I have no problem with Grinders, so long as they worked it into a reasonable story. Meaning, a weapons test of some kind.
It's the flat looking, zero dialog grinder missions that bother me. Not a fan of those super stack item farmer missions either.
I myself have made a few grinder style missions, but they always had a story mission behind them that made logical sense.
Example: A one year ship rundown of your weapon systems against holographic enemy contacts. Not only is there dialog with a patrol ship in the area that is administrating the test, but you have to activate the generator beacon to begin the test and collect the data from said beacon after the test is concluded.
So long as it has a logical story behind the grinder, I am cool with them.
You know Cryptic has Jumped the Proverbial Shark when they introduced Tractor Pulling to Star Trek Online!
I think the last three pages have proven that there is a large emphasis for the needs of the rewards from the IOR repeatable do to its rewards in comparison to the other sources of DL and FMs. (EC is debatable since those missions were there when Foundry first dropped loot, and back when it started dropping loot again. Just now that you can get DL and FMs with it there is more "WOOOO" involved.)
I am of the opinion that the state of acclimation to the new system (and perhaps the honest low rewards from the FM based Missions from PuGging them) has made the current rewards disproportionate. The result is people after the fastest and people assuming this is why foundry rewards were implemented.
Adjustment of the rewards given by IOR or the Rewards given by other missions (Say Fleet Missions gave double FMs than currently and 480dl or something) is the only way to stem the poor grinder mission behavior. ("Poor" being the AFK or Boff Hunt missions, tied with perhaps the Contraband and EC grinder missions)
Possible short term solutions until we get the better reward system in place, bump the repeat timer up to 45 minutes. The rewards would match 3 Fleet Mission runs or 2 Normal STF runs timewise. People would still take the easy way, but, IOR won't feel like this needed necessity over a casual reward for time spent.
However, the comments about the improved UI and search features are something we need to keep focused on because the damage has been done.
If tomorrow rewards were all removed (which I don't think is the right course of action) we'd still have the problem of the Grinders clogging the list. Now no one will play them to down rate one with a 80% 5 star ratio. Conversely, without rewards the vast majority of plays will again slim and good missions won't get up voted a fair speed.
No matter what happens with the rewards or if these missions types stay or go, we have a problem. All of us. ANY new mission of ANY type is going to have it harder.
Example: A one year ship rundown of your weapon systems against holographic enemy contacts. Not only is there dialog with a patrol ship in the area that is administrating the test, but you have to activate the generator beacon to begin the test and collect the data from said beacon after the test is concluded.
I've actually used this mission to test my ships and boffs and it is useful. But the ones with five waves of five inactive Borg cubes can go rot.
Here is the bottom line for all you complainers about grinders, if it wasn't for the grinders I and most of the people who use them still wouldn't play your story line missions. You keep whining on and on about how noone wants to play your story missions, why would getting rid of the easy missions change this? If I am using a grinder mission its because i want quick easy dilithium and/or marks, if they were not there I would simply run an STF instead, they are much quicker than most story missions. Given the massive increase in dilithium demand with no real increase in supply that we have seen with S7 grinder missions are almost a necessity. If you seriously think that removing the grinder missions would get you guys one more play through of your story missions you are deluding yourselves.
A real solution to getting your missions played through would be to have a process where missions could be submitted for approval, and if they met a specified standard would drop random very rare xi or xii items at the end. If a system like this was in place I and others would be more inclined to play your missions.
Here is the bottom line for all you complainers about grinders, if it wasn't for the grinders I and most of the people who use them still wouldn't play your story line missions. You keep whining on and on about how noone wants to play your story missions, why would getting rid of the easy missions change this? If I am using a grinder mission its because i want quick easy dilithium and/or marks, if they were not there I would simply run an STF instead, they are much quicker than most story missions. Given the massive increase in dilithium demand with no real increase in supply that we have seen with S7 grinder missions are almost a necessity. If you seriously think that removing the grinder missions would get you guys one more play through of your story missions you are deluding yourselves.
A real solution to getting your missions played through would be to have a process where missions could be submitted for approval, and if they met a specified standard would drop random very rare xi or xii items at the end. If a system like this was in place I and others would be more inclined to play your missions.
That is a great Idea. If someone told me that the Foundry mission with a 5 star rate would have a chance at XII purple ACC X2 wep and or some special gear then I would be all over it. If I want a good Star Trek story I'll read one of the books. For me to run a mission there has to be someting in it for me at the end. (sorry if this makes some mad) But for some the 5-6 hundred thousand they made off of a grinder allowed them to save up pretty fast and buy something nice. If other non-grinder missions had some XII purple stuff in it I would play every single one of them.
I think it's that the way the stories are presented that's failing to engage players. It's a case of these popup text boxes interrupting your gameplay instead of a story grabbing your attention for most people. Short of having custom audio and a solid cutscene tool, the story should be told through the characters, having speech bubbles appear overhead and have their actions play out in that perspective.
I think it's that the way the stories are presented that's failing to engage players. It's a case of these popup text boxes interrupting your gameplay instead of a story grabbing your attention for most people. Short of having custom audio and a solid cutscene tool, the story should be told through the characters, having speech bubbles appear overhead and have their actions play out in that perspective.
Keep in mind, the Foundry is in many ways inferior to the editor that came with Morrowwind in 2002.
Here is the bottom line for all you complainers about grinders, if it wasn't for the grinders I and most of the people who use them still wouldn't play your story line missions. You keep whining on and on about how noone wants to play your story missions, why would getting rid of the easy missions change this? If I am using a grinder mission its because i want quick easy dilithium and/or marks, if they were not there I would simply run an STF instead, they are much quicker than most story missions. Given the massive increase in dilithium demand with no real increase in supply that we have seen with S7 grinder missions are almost a necessity. If you seriously think that removing the grinder missions would get you guys one more play through of your story missions you are deluding yourselves.
A real solution to getting your missions played through would be to have a process where missions could be submitted for approval, and if they met a specified standard would drop random very rare xi or xii items at the end. If a system like this was in place I and others would be more inclined to play your missions.
Two things;
First, you're not playing our story missions anyways by the way you explained yourself there. And although I would like to see rewards stay, we did get players even when mobs in foundry didn't drop anything. So, take that as you will.
Second, That specific reward scheme you mentioned is exactly what is coming to the spotlight foundry missions. It actually was on Tribble during the S7 testing, but needed to be recalled do to bugs. It will probably be fully operational again soon (tm).
And WHEN they did, you all would be right back here with your pitchforks and torches: BURN THE HERETIC!!
Ultimately, your picking another fight with the majority of the playerbase in order to force them to play your way. It never works out the way you planned, as you can see with how abolishing the clickers have turned out for you.
Actually, ultimately it really comes down to whether it is worth our while to make missions. If players only want grinders then we can all just move on to other games. Then you guys can just grind away to your hearts content and we can devote our efforts to something else.
However, there are people who do like the story missions, so it is probably premature for us to give up on the Foundry. The trouble is those missions are buried under tons of grinders, and that is a real issue, as has been discussed.
Give us two categories, combat centric, and story centric, and we're set. Let us choose the category, or even have it be set automatically (maybe mission length/number of combat encounters) and I think this would solve a lot of people's complaints. The problem right now is the story missions are buried amongst a lot of mindless grinds, which makes people upset. I don't think that many people even care if people want to pew pew, but we would like our story-based missions to get some billing as well.
Here is the bottom line for all you complainers about grinders, if it wasn't for the grinders I and most of the people who use them still wouldn't play your story line missions. You keep whining on and on about how noone wants to play your story missions, why would getting rid of the easy missions change this? If I am using a grinder mission its because i want quick easy dilithium and/or marks, if they were not there I would simply run an STF instead, they are much quicker than most story missions. Given the massive increase in dilithium demand with no real increase in supply that we have seen with S7 grinder missions are almost a necessity. If you seriously think that removing the grinder missions would get you guys one more play through of your story missions you are deluding yourselves.
A real solution to getting your missions played through would be to have a process where missions could be submitted for approval, and if they met a specified standard would drop random very rare xi or xii items at the end. If a system like this was in place I and others would be more inclined to play your missions.
The biggest problem is not that grinders exist, it's that they're swamping the lists to the point that it's hard to find the storyline missions.
The UI needs to be updated to allow people to find what they are looking for without wading through a bunch of stuff they don't want.
I went to do some KDF story missions last night and gave up on finding them. I'll check these forums to find titles to search on; the UI is pretty much a waste for sorting through mission types.
I went to do some KDF story missions last night and gave up on finding them. I'll check these forums to find titles to search on; the UI is pretty much a waste for sorting through mission types.
Give us two categories, combat centric, and story centric, and we're set. Let us choose the category, or even have it be set automatically (maybe mission length/number of combat encounters) and I think this would solve a lot of people's complaints. The problem right now is the story missions are buried amongst a lot of mindless grinds, which makes people upset. I don't think that many people even care if people want to pew pew, but we would like our story-based missions to get some billing as well.
I guess it depends on how you define story- vs. combat-centric. I've played some good story missions that were largely combat, but it was the story wrapper that gave the combat solid context. While it would be perfectly possible to flag such missions as story-centric, there might be those who would disagree because of too much combat. That could be alleviated to a certain extent by including comments about the level of combat in the description text.
But overall, I agree with your assessment. Sorting through the grinders to find story missions is a pain right now.
I'll point out that the idea of a tab/categorization is not entirely about grind/story, that's just a motivating and useful permutation.
It'd ALSO be nice to have, say, things like 'serious, dialog-heavy, series, holonovel' and so on as tags people can search on.
And it should ideally be integrated into the UI -- City of Heroes authors did a decent job at coming up with their own tag system with codes so people could easily/rapidly find different kinds of missions, but getting everyone to take part in the same system or even be aware of the system was a challenge.
Campaign: The Fenwick Cycle NWS-DKR9GB7KH
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?
The biggest problem is not that grinders exist, it's that they're swamping the lists to the point that it's hard to find the storyline missions.
The UI needs to be updated to allow people to find what they are looking for without wading through a bunch of stuff they don't want.
I went to do some KDF story missions last night and gave up on finding them. I'll check these forums to find titles to search on; the UI is pretty much a waste for sorting through mission types.
I'd actually agree with you on the story missions getting buried, having separate categories would certainly help things.
Thank you very much for the laugh. I needed it today.
I haven't digested so much ego-ridden tripe since I watched JJ Abram's TED talk. I guess an appropriate gif would be the U MAD BRO? trollface, because what's really sticking in your craw is that the popular kids are being voted prom queen by the school assembly and you're not. And you guys are going crazy mad about it to the point of petitioning Cryptic to nerf the game. Not to mention making public fools of yourselves to the point where the Community Moderator has to tell you to cool down.
All you really had to do was push hard for some kind of subject breakdown of foundry missions, not some self-righteous crusade against other foundry authors.
you are hillarious, i can hardly stop laughing at you long enough to type this. Calling people facists, anti-intellectual/anti-artistic, and reptilian-brain is always a good sign of a desperate man's last gasps for life.
Those terms are used in conversations with you often enough for you to identify them as common signs?
Huh.
Campaign: The Fenwick Cycle NWS-DKR9GB7KH
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?
I agree with the idea of a category/tagging system to allow players to spot and play the types of missions the want, and weed out the types they aren't interested in. I doubt most players want to spend as long as I do vetting mission descriptions and/or specific keyword searching to decide if they're the kind of thing I want to play.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Guys, don't bust what's been good in this topic now. Refocus on the Grinders, their place in foundry, and how we should manage the system.
I realllllly don't want want this one slapped shut on us on a bad note.
I think we need to look at this economically. This is a situation where Utilitarianism is something we should consider rather than art or personal beliefs on the subject, least of all ego.
How do you make a working community system where the commonality is for an individual to simply better themselves financially. Not saying, I have an answer for it, but, that economical question has been asked by great minds since the 18th century.
No a rating war would not be good, not when we've complained so long and hard about the one-star bandits. Gotta take the high road... up to a point anyway.
Still I think we need to draw Cryptic's attention to this - because as we know they rarely pay attention to this forum. Believe it or not KF, it's even worse if you look in the under five reviews section. So so so many grinders and rumbles and whatever clever name they apply to their attempt to get ahead in the laziest way possible, all struggling to get out of purgatory.
So, I think we need to start tweet spamming every Cryptic @handle with images of the "hot list" all full of grinders and use the hashtag #IsThisWhatYouWanted
Or this is how we like to play , blow stuff up, not read for a hour.
Battleship Royal Rumble (longest running grinder type I know of) :
9,813 plays with ratings
First Cause, Then Effect (first spotlighted STORY mission with the new system) :
48,872 plays with ratings
No further comment
First Cause is almost as old as the Foundry. For a mission to have 1/5th of the plays in like 2 months is astonishing. The difference, of course, is that people don't usually replay First Cause.
Comments
It's the flat looking, zero dialog grinder missions that bother me. Not a fan of those super stack item farmer missions either.
I myself have made a few grinder style missions, but they always had a story mission behind them that made logical sense.
Example: A one year ship rundown of your weapon systems against holographic enemy contacts. Not only is there dialog with a patrol ship in the area that is administrating the test, but you have to activate the generator beacon to begin the test and collect the data from said beacon after the test is concluded.
So long as it has a logical story behind the grinder, I am cool with them.
I am of the opinion that the state of acclimation to the new system (and perhaps the honest low rewards from the FM based Missions from PuGging them) has made the current rewards disproportionate. The result is people after the fastest and people assuming this is why foundry rewards were implemented.
Adjustment of the rewards given by IOR or the Rewards given by other missions (Say Fleet Missions gave double FMs than currently and 480dl or something) is the only way to stem the poor grinder mission behavior. ("Poor" being the AFK or Boff Hunt missions, tied with perhaps the Contraband and EC grinder missions)
Possible short term solutions until we get the better reward system in place, bump the repeat timer up to 45 minutes. The rewards would match 3 Fleet Mission runs or 2 Normal STF runs timewise. People would still take the easy way, but, IOR won't feel like this needed necessity over a casual reward for time spent.
However, the comments about the improved UI and search features are something we need to keep focused on because the damage has been done.
If tomorrow rewards were all removed (which I don't think is the right course of action) we'd still have the problem of the Grinders clogging the list. Now no one will play them to down rate one with a 80% 5 star ratio. Conversely, without rewards the vast majority of plays will again slim and good missions won't get up voted a fair speed.
No matter what happens with the rewards or if these missions types stay or go, we have a problem. All of us. ANY new mission of ANY type is going to have it harder.
Should stop calling it the Foundry though. It's the Grindry.
I've actually used this mission to test my ships and boffs and it is useful. But the ones with five waves of five inactive Borg cubes can go rot.
A real solution to getting your missions played through would be to have a process where missions could be submitted for approval, and if they met a specified standard would drop random very rare xi or xii items at the end. If a system like this was in place I and others would be more inclined to play your missions.
That is a great Idea. If someone told me that the Foundry mission with a 5 star rate would have a chance at XII purple ACC X2 wep and or some special gear then I would be all over it. If I want a good Star Trek story I'll read one of the books. For me to run a mission there has to be someting in it for me at the end. (sorry if this makes some mad) But for some the 5-6 hundred thousand they made off of a grinder allowed them to save up pretty fast and buy something nice. If other non-grinder missions had some XII purple stuff in it I would play every single one of them.
Keep in mind, the Foundry is in many ways inferior to the editor that came with Morrowwind in 2002.
Two things;
First, you're not playing our story missions anyways by the way you explained yourself there. And although I would like to see rewards stay, we did get players even when mobs in foundry didn't drop anything. So, take that as you will.
Second, That specific reward scheme you mentioned is exactly what is coming to the spotlight foundry missions. It actually was on Tribble during the S7 testing, but needed to be recalled do to bugs. It will probably be fully operational again soon (tm).
Actually, ultimately it really comes down to whether it is worth our while to make missions. If players only want grinders then we can all just move on to other games. Then you guys can just grind away to your hearts content and we can devote our efforts to something else.
However, there are people who do like the story missions, so it is probably premature for us to give up on the Foundry. The trouble is those missions are buried under tons of grinders, and that is a real issue, as has been discussed.
Give us two categories, combat centric, and story centric, and we're set. Let us choose the category, or even have it be set automatically (maybe mission length/number of combat encounters) and I think this would solve a lot of people's complaints. The problem right now is the story missions are buried amongst a lot of mindless grinds, which makes people upset. I don't think that many people even care if people want to pew pew, but we would like our story-based missions to get some billing as well.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
The biggest problem is not that grinders exist, it's that they're swamping the lists to the point that it's hard to find the storyline missions.
The UI needs to be updated to allow people to find what they are looking for without wading through a bunch of stuff they don't want.
I went to do some KDF story missions last night and gave up on finding them. I'll check these forums to find titles to search on; the UI is pretty much a waste for sorting through mission types.
Best KDF content I have found.
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=506631
I guess it depends on how you define story- vs. combat-centric. I've played some good story missions that were largely combat, but it was the story wrapper that gave the combat solid context. While it would be perfectly possible to flag such missions as story-centric, there might be those who would disagree because of too much combat. That could be alleviated to a certain extent by including comments about the level of combat in the description text.
But overall, I agree with your assessment. Sorting through the grinders to find story missions is a pain right now.
It'd ALSO be nice to have, say, things like 'serious, dialog-heavy, series, holonovel' and so on as tags people can search on.
And it should ideally be integrated into the UI -- City of Heroes authors did a decent job at coming up with their own tag system with codes so people could easily/rapidly find different kinds of missions, but getting everyone to take part in the same system or even be aware of the system was a challenge.
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?
I'd actually agree with you on the story missions getting buried, having separate categories would certainly help things.
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w192/kenny90_bucket/gif-picard-clapping.gif
I haven't digested so much ego-ridden tripe since I watched JJ Abram's TED talk. I guess an appropriate gif would be the U MAD BRO? trollface, because what's really sticking in your craw is that the popular kids are being voted prom queen by the school assembly and you're not. And you guys are going crazy mad about it to the point of petitioning Cryptic to nerf the game. Not to mention making public fools of yourselves to the point where the Community Moderator has to tell you to cool down.
All you really had to do was push hard for some kind of subject breakdown of foundry missions, not some self-righteous crusade against other foundry authors.
Those terms are used in conversations with you often enough for you to identify them as common signs?
Huh.
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?
http://assets0.ordienetworks.com/images/GifGuide/clapping/riker.gif
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
I realllllly don't want want this one slapped shut on us on a bad note.
I think we need to look at this economically. This is a situation where Utilitarianism is something we should consider rather than art or personal beliefs on the subject, least of all ego.
How do you make a working community system where the commonality is for an individual to simply better themselves financially. Not saying, I have an answer for it, but, that economical question has been asked by great minds since the 18th century.
Or this is how we like to play , blow stuff up, not read for a hour.
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?
Battleship Royal Rumble (longest running grinder type I know of) :
9,813 plays with ratings
First Cause, Then Effect (first spotlighted STORY mission with the new system) :
48,872 plays with ratings
No further comment
First Cause is almost as old as the Foundry. For a mission to have 1/5th of the plays in like 2 months is astonishing. The difference, of course, is that people don't usually replay First Cause.