This may be right, too many people wanting female Romulans... so the male ones are... enhanced? LOL
The gender equality appears to only affect rare at the moment. Basically, same problem before the supposed fix. Very rare BOFFs still show incorrect information for both genders.
There are multiple problems here as illustrated below.
Summary:
1) there are no Basic Romulan Operative BOFFs (see green)
2) trait assignments are not consistent with BOFF quality (see blue)
3) tooltip descriptions do not match the right-click descriptions (all).
4) right-click descriptions for Subterfuge abilities lack numerical data (all).
Romulan Male Engineering Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge Romulan Female Engineering Officer Candidate -- Basic Subterfuge Romulan Male Tactical Officer Candidate -- Superior Romulan Operative Romulan Female Tactical Officer Candidate -- Romulan Operative Romulan Male Science Officer Candidate -- Basic Subterfuge Romulan Female Science Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge
Romulan Male Engineering Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Plasma Romulan Female Engineering Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Plasma Romulan Male Tactical Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Plasma Romulan Female Tactical Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Plasma Romulan Male Science Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Stasis Romulan Female Science Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Stasis
Descriptions from default tooltip:
Basic Subterfuge -- Increased critical hit and expose chance.
Superior Subterfuge -- Increased critical hit and expose chance.
Romulan Operative -- Increased critical hit and critical severity, decreases cloak cooldown.
Superior Operative -- Increased critical hit and critical severity, decreases cloak cooldown.
Descriptions from right click:
Basic Subterfuge -- Space Trait. Increases the effectiveness of cloaking abilities. Increases the effectiveness of the damage buff the ship gains after decloaking.
Superior Subterfuge -- Space Trait. Increases the effectiveness of cloaking abilities. Increases the effectiveness of the damage buff the ship gains after decloaking.
Romulan Operative -- Increases critical hit chance and critical hit severity. Decreases the cooldown of cloaking abilities. Passive. +1.5% critical chance, +3.8% critical severity, +10% power recharge speed for cloaking.
Superior Romulan Operative -- Increases critical hit chance and critical hit severity. Decreases the cooldown of cloaking abilities. Passive. +2% critical chance, +5% critical severity, +15% power recharge speed for cloaking.
From here 2/13:
Updated Romulan Traits:
Renamed the Covert Operative traits to Romulan Operative to avoid it being confused with the "Covert" trait.
The Basic Romulan Operative, Romulan Operative, and Superior Romulan Operative traits now can stack with themselves if the player has multiple Bridge Officers with the same trait.
For example, having two officers with Romulan Operative will now provide the combined bonuses from both officers.
Decreased the critical hit chance provided by the Basic Romulan Operative, Romulan Operative, and Superior Romulan Operative traits to 1%, 1.5%, and 2%, respectively.
The Basic Romulan Operative, Romulan Operative, and Superior Romulan Operative traits now also provide a slight increase to critical severity.
The increases are 2.5%, 3.75%, and 5% Critical Severity, respectively.
^ the above indicates that there should be a Basic Romulan Operative.
Basically, the Uncommon Romulan Tactical BOFF inherited the Rare Tactical BOFF trait. And the Male Rare Tactical BOFF inherited the Very Rare Tactical BOFF. The only Tactical BOFF that is correct is the Female Rare Tactical BOFF.
Uncommong Female/Male, Rare Male, and Very Rare Female/Male were not patched correctly.
archoncrypticMember, Cryptic DevelopersPosts: 0Arc User
edited February 2013
I've been investigating these issues, and I have a few answers for you.
These officers were intentionally given slightly better trait distributions than a standard Bridge Officer of their Quality level.
Bridge Officers have four traits. Normally, they are laid out as follows:
Green - 1-2 Basic, 2-3 Standard
Blue - 1 Basic, 2 Standard, 1 Superior
Purple - 2 Standard, 2 Superior
There are some exceptions to this.
Since the Romulan officers require reputation, unlocks, etc. to purchase, they were given slightly "better" layouts, as follows:
Green - 1 Basic, 3 Standard
Blue - 2 Standard, 2 Superior
Purple - 4 Superior
In addition, these Romulan Bridge Officers deviate from normal Bridge Officers in that rather than having a standard racial ability, they have either one of the levels of Subterfuge *or* Covert Operative.
These traits were assigned randomly; the fact that Tactical BOFFs ended up with Romulan Operative was a consequence of random allocation with a small sample size. This is also why males and females have slightly different layouts; this wasn't to make some better than others, they just have different randomly assigned traits (but should have the same number of "points", so to speak).
The fact that there are no officers with Basic Romulan Operative is also a consequence of random generation with a small sample size. We can "fix" this by just adding some more possible trait combinations to the store. This won't impact anything that's already been purchased - we can just add more options that people can buy. No ETA on this; it's on the radar, though.
Another confusing factor is that the quality level of these BOFFs might appear to be higher after you purchase them. For example, if you buy a blue Romulan BOFF, this will appear to be Purple in your roster - this is because the system determines that they have a number of trait points in the "Purple" range and displays them that way. Obviously, this is pretty confusing, and I'm looking for a way to fix it without nerfing the existing blue officers.
The trait tooltips being inconsistent is a bug, plain and simple. That's already fixed internally, and hopefully it should get to players soon.
When and if we put more Romulan BOFFs in the game, we'll be much clearer about how they're supposed to work. My apologies for the confusion.
The random distribution of the traits is a really strange way to have implemented them - if I want to increase my ship's damage, a blue (rather than purple) Romulan male (but not female) is the best way to do so. Thanks for the clarification.
I've been investigating these issues, and I have a few answers for you.
These officers were intentionally given slightly better trait distributions than a standard Bridge Officer of their Quality level.
Bridge Officers have four traits. Normally, they are laid out as follows:
Green - 1-2 Basic, 2-3 Standard
Blue - 1 Basic, 2 Standard, 1 Superior
Purple - 2 Standard, 2 Superior
There are some exceptions to this.
Since the Romulan officers require reputation, unlocks, etc. to purchase, they were given slightly "better" layouts, as follows:
Green - 1 Basic, 3 Standard
Blue - 2 Standard, 2 Superior
Purple - 4 Superior
In addition, these Romulan Bridge Officers deviate from normal Bridge Officers in that rather than having a standard racial ability, they have either one of the levels of Subterfuge *or* Covert Operative.
These traits were assigned randomly; the fact that Tactical BOFFs ended up with Romulan Operative was a consequence of random allocation with a small sample size. This is also why males and females have slightly different layouts; this wasn't to make some better than others, they just have different randomly assigned traits (but should have the same number of "points", so to speak).
The fact that there are no officers with Basic Romulan Operative is also a consequence of random generation with a small sample size. We can "fix" this by just adding some more possible trait combinations to the store. This won't impact anything that's already been purchased - we can just add more options that people can buy. No ETA on this; it's on the radar, though.
Another confusing factor is that the quality level of these BOFFs might appear to be higher after you purchase them. For example, if you buy a blue Romulan BOFF, this will appear to be Purple in your roster - this is because the system determines that they have a number of trait points in the "Purple" range and displays them that way. Obviously, this is pretty confusing, and I'm looking for a way to fix it without nerfing the existing blue officers.
The trait tooltips being inconsistent is a bug, plain and simple. That's already fixed internally, and hopefully it should get to players soon.
When and if we put more Romulan BOFFs in the game, we'll be much clearer about how they're supposed to work. My apologies for the confusion.
Prior to the recent adjustment, the Uncommon Romulan BOFFs were Basic Covert Operatives. Then they became Romulan Operative. The Rare Romulan Tactical BOFFs were Superior Covert Operative. Now the Male version is Superior Romulan Operative.
Sounds like Basic fell off the map with the recent changes.
Honestly, I'd rather you just fix what the Tactical BOFFs are supposed to be and fix the Science/Engineering BOFFS. The Operative should be restricted to one type of BOFF. If you give Operative to Science/Engineering BOFFs, you will have entire bridges filled with Operative BOFFs and would granting ships high amounts of Critical Hit and Severity with no compensation (other than having Efficient and Leadership triats).
I've been investigating these issues, and I have a few answers for you.
...
These traits were assigned randomly; the fact that Tactical BOFFs ended up with Romulan Operative was a consequence of random allocation with a small sample size. This is also why males and females have slightly different layouts; this wasn't to make some better than others,
...
Why on earth would you randomly assign traits to store boffs when there is such a limited set? Were you at some point thinking to have them randomly generate say every day/week/month whatever? It seemed like the code that kept randomly regenerating boffs (for example ones stuck in the mission log) got turned off a month or two ago, is this just a consequence of that?
There are 18 boffs, total. Half of which are Male/Female distinctions. Each of the 18 only gets 1 space trait, and that's the new hotness, so that should have been hand checked/tuned.
I appreciate that you've come out to say you aren't going to nerf the rare quality male romulan Tacticals or science, but the question is one of whether or not you're going to add very rare boffs that are strictly better onto the fleet vendor (either new boffs or adjustments to the existing ones there).
It would make the most sense if the boffs actually had deliberately tiered progression from the fleet vendor. For 160k fleet credits and 40k dil they probably should....
Whatever comes out of it, we appreciate you looking into it, though it would be really nice if you could let us know what the plan is at least, so we can decide if we want to spend our virtual money or hold off until apparently, more romulan boffs from other sources appear.
0
archoncrypticMember, Cryptic DevelopersPosts: 0Arc User
edited February 2013
When I say "randomly", I don't mean that they were truly algorithmically generated like some Bridge Officers were. Rather, there was a short list generated of possible trait combinations, and a limited number of those trait combinations that added up to appropriate point values for each quality level were selected.
What I meant to explain was that we weren't intentionally making males better than females - and with the exception of the traits that were clearly class-specific (like Stasis Specialist), we didn't assign those based on class.
Sorry for the confusion; that was poor phrasing on my part.
The primary reason there's such a limited set of BOFFs is artwork; our artists only had time to make a limited number of variants on Romulan appearances. The more we make, the more duplication we'd run into, and it's awkward to have several BOFFs that look identical.
Prior to the recent adjustment, the Uncommon Romulan BOFFs were Basic Covert Operatives. Then they became Romulan Operative. The Rare Romulan Tactical BOFFs were Superior Covert Operative. Now the Male version is Superior Romulan Operative.
I changed the names from Covert Operative to Romulan Operative (to avoid confusion with Covert, which sounded too similar to Covert Operative). That wouldn't impact the quality of what's on the BOFFs themselves, though. It's possible another designer changed what traits were on the Uncommon BOFFs - I can check into that.
The primary reason there's such a limited set of BOFFs is artwork; our artists only had time to make a limited number of variants on Romulan appearances. The more we make, the more duplication we'd run into, and it's awkward to have several BOFFs that look identical.
A problem easily solved by allowing for modification of the Boff's appearance. Instead...you made them all look identical. Wasn't that the situation you were trying to avoid?
I changed the names from Covert Operative to Romulan Operative (to avoid confusion with Covert, which sounded too similar to Covert Operative). That wouldn't impact the quality of what's on the BOFFs themselves, though. It's possible another designer changed what traits were on the Uncommon BOFFs - I can check into that.
I should point out that the values attributed to the type of Operative (Basic Operative, Operative, and Superior Operative) appear to be correct.
That is to say, the Romulan Operative that is (incorrectly) associated with the Uncommon Romulan Tactical BOFF gives a value of 1.5%. Since there are no Basic Romulan Operatives (which should be Uncommon), I can't say if it's 1%. I believe, when I looked at the Male Rare Romulan Tactical BOFF, the value was 2%.
Again, it sounds like the Basic Operative got bumped off and all the higher traits were bumped down (again, incorrectly) to the next lower rarity.
This is probably contributing to why the Very Rare Tactical Officers have Subterfuge instead of Superior Operative.
It seems like the only correct Romulan Tactical Officer is the Female Rare Tactical BOFF with her Romulan Operative trait (even though the Male has the Superior Operative, incorrectly of course).
When I say "randomly", I don't mean that they were truly algorithmically generated like some Bridge Officers were. Rather, there was a short list generated of possible trait combinations, and a limited number of those trait combinations that added up to appropriate point values for each quality level were selected.
What I meant to explain was that we weren't intentionally making males better than females - and with the exception of the traits that were clearly class-specific (like Stasis Specialist), we didn't assign those based on class.
I had assumed that Romulan Operative was limited to tactical on purpose for balance reasons, since if a crit chance and severity trait was potentially available on any career BOff I'd fill my bridge with 100% of that. Because my ship can't stealth subterfuge has 0 value to me, and it's therefore a downgrade to go from one of the blue Romulan tac BOffs to a purple one which seems backwards. That the blue male BOff has the better version of the trait further confuses things.
Can you see why the inconsistency with the space traits makes them very confusing for us?
For the ground traits, sure, whatever, but space traits actually make a difference in stuff people run at max level.
It sounds like you've basically decided that, for the purposes of these boffs, traits like Superior Stubborn were equivalent to traits like Superior Romulan Operative.
For the algorithm that decides a boff's quality when it picks a color for the roster, that's fine.
For an item that costs an exorbitant amount of dilithium and fleet credit, well, that's not fine. No one in their right mind would pay so much for a trait that isn't exclusive.
All superior traits may be equal in the algorithm, but they clearly *aren't* equal.
When I say "randomly", I don't mean that they were truly algorithmically generated like some Bridge Officers were. Rather, there was a short list generated of possible trait combinations, and a limited number of those trait combinations that added up to appropriate point values for each quality level were selected.
Why even bother with any sort of random generation? Theres only 18 bridge officers. Why not just give the Greens the Basic Trait, Blues the Regular Trait and the Purples the Superior trait. And repeat with the oter departments.
Because I really would love to have the Blue and Purple female Romulan Tactical BOffs but the only Blue that has the correct trait is the Male officer and the Purples just are wrong all over.
In addition, these Romulan Bridge Officers deviate from normal Bridge Officers in that rather than having a standard racial ability, they have either one of the levels of Subterfuge *or* Covert Operative.
These traits were assigned randomly; the fact that Tactical BOFFs ended up with Romulan Operative was a consequence of random allocation with a small sample size. This is also why males and females have slightly different layouts; this wasn't to make some better than others, they just have different randomly assigned traits (but should have the same number of "points", so to speak).
The fact that there are no officers with Basic Romulan Operative is also a consequence of random generation with a small sample size. We can "fix" this by just adding some more possible trait combinations to the store. This won't impact anything that's already been purchased - we can just add more options that people can buy. No ETA on this; it's on the radar, though.
That's just silly. There is no reason to have used random allocation when the resulting output is so small. It would take the work of less than 10 minutes to go through the list and assign 3 of each category to each level of ability and make the actual use of the boffs mach their cost. If there were other methods of acquiring Romulan boffs it would make some sense but there is not.
As absurd as this situation is, the honest explanation and communicating with us is appreciated. Thank you for that, Archon.
Now, I will echo the sentiment of a previous poster and request some details on planned changes. I've already wasted a week's worth of dilithium and a pile of fleet credits on an officer that turned out to be completely useless (and apparently will remain so), so buying another one is not something I plan to do before we learn just how the Rommies will be handled.
Please keep in mind that these things take quite a bit of effort to acquire in game, and thus are not something to be changed around on a whim.
I've already wasted a week's worth of dilithium and a pile of fleet credits on an officer that turned out to be completely useless (and apparently will remain so), so buying another one is not something I plan to do before we learn just how the Rommies will be handled.
Why would it remain so? The ones we already owned were changed with the recent patch (trait ability and now much they received). I do not think it would be impossible to fix the ones that have already been purchased.
Comments
www.divisionhispana.com
Female blue Tac has the basic trait while male has the superior version.
Both male and female purple Tacs have Subterfuge instead of Romulan Operative.
Nerf carried through successfully, fixes didn't happen. Maybe next week.
Cant be that this is still broken! ?How hard is to fix it?
Division Hispana
www.divisionhispana.com
Preliminary testing says they do, for now.
This may be right, too many people wanting female Romulans... so the male ones are... enhanced? LOL
Summary:
1) there are no Basic Romulan Operative BOFFs (see green)
2) trait assignments are not consistent with BOFF quality (see blue)
3) tooltip descriptions do not match the right-click descriptions (all).
4) right-click descriptions for Subterfuge abilities lack numerical data (all).
Traits as of 2/16 (confirmed in game):
Romulan Male Engineering Officer Candidate -- Basic Subterfuge
Romulan Female Engineering Officer Candidate -- Basic Subterfuge
Romulan Male Tactical Officer Candidate -- Romulan Operative
Romulan Female Tactical Officer Candidate -- Romulan Operative
Romulan Male Science Officer Candidate -- Basic Subterfuge
Romulan Female Science Officer Candidate -- Basic Subterfuge
Romulan Male Engineering Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge
Romulan Female Engineering Officer Candidate -- Basic Subterfuge
Romulan Male Tactical Officer Candidate -- Superior Romulan Operative
Romulan Female Tactical Officer Candidate -- Romulan Operative
Romulan Male Science Officer Candidate -- Basic Subterfuge
Romulan Female Science Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge
Romulan Male Engineering Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Plasma
Romulan Female Engineering Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Plasma
Romulan Male Tactical Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Plasma
Romulan Female Tactical Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Plasma
Romulan Male Science Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Stasis
Romulan Female Science Officer Candidate -- Superior Subterfuge / Superior Stasis
Descriptions from default tooltip:
Basic Subterfuge -- Increased critical hit and expose chance.
Superior Subterfuge -- Increased critical hit and expose chance.
Romulan Operative -- Increased critical hit and critical severity, decreases cloak cooldown.
Superior Operative -- Increased critical hit and critical severity, decreases cloak cooldown.
Descriptions from right click:
Basic Subterfuge -- Space Trait. Increases the effectiveness of cloaking abilities. Increases the effectiveness of the damage buff the ship gains after decloaking.
Superior Subterfuge -- Space Trait. Increases the effectiveness of cloaking abilities. Increases the effectiveness of the damage buff the ship gains after decloaking.
Romulan Operative -- Increases critical hit chance and critical hit severity. Decreases the cooldown of cloaking abilities. Passive. +1.5% critical chance, +3.8% critical severity, +10% power recharge speed for cloaking.
Superior Romulan Operative -- Increases critical hit chance and critical hit severity. Decreases the cooldown of cloaking abilities. Passive. +2% critical chance, +5% critical severity, +15% power recharge speed for cloaking.
^ the above indicates that there should be a Basic Romulan Operative.
Uncommong Female/Male, Rare Male, and Very Rare Female/Male were not patched correctly.
These officers were intentionally given slightly better trait distributions than a standard Bridge Officer of their Quality level.
Bridge Officers have four traits. Normally, they are laid out as follows:
Green - 1-2 Basic, 2-3 Standard
Blue - 1 Basic, 2 Standard, 1 Superior
Purple - 2 Standard, 2 Superior
There are some exceptions to this.
Since the Romulan officers require reputation, unlocks, etc. to purchase, they were given slightly "better" layouts, as follows:
Green - 1 Basic, 3 Standard
Blue - 2 Standard, 2 Superior
Purple - 4 Superior
In addition, these Romulan Bridge Officers deviate from normal Bridge Officers in that rather than having a standard racial ability, they have either one of the levels of Subterfuge *or* Covert Operative.
These traits were assigned randomly; the fact that Tactical BOFFs ended up with Romulan Operative was a consequence of random allocation with a small sample size. This is also why males and females have slightly different layouts; this wasn't to make some better than others, they just have different randomly assigned traits (but should have the same number of "points", so to speak).
The fact that there are no officers with Basic Romulan Operative is also a consequence of random generation with a small sample size. We can "fix" this by just adding some more possible trait combinations to the store. This won't impact anything that's already been purchased - we can just add more options that people can buy. No ETA on this; it's on the radar, though.
Another confusing factor is that the quality level of these BOFFs might appear to be higher after you purchase them. For example, if you buy a blue Romulan BOFF, this will appear to be Purple in your roster - this is because the system determines that they have a number of trait points in the "Purple" range and displays them that way. Obviously, this is pretty confusing, and I'm looking for a way to fix it without nerfing the existing blue officers.
The trait tooltips being inconsistent is a bug, plain and simple. That's already fixed internally, and hopefully it should get to players soon.
When and if we put more Romulan BOFFs in the game, we'll be much clearer about how they're supposed to work. My apologies for the confusion.
Sounds like Basic fell off the map with the recent changes.
Honestly, I'd rather you just fix what the Tactical BOFFs are supposed to be and fix the Science/Engineering BOFFS. The Operative should be restricted to one type of BOFF. If you give Operative to Science/Engineering BOFFs, you will have entire bridges filled with Operative BOFFs and would granting ships high amounts of Critical Hit and Severity with no compensation (other than having Efficient and Leadership triats).
Why on earth would you randomly assign traits to store boffs when there is such a limited set? Were you at some point thinking to have them randomly generate say every day/week/month whatever? It seemed like the code that kept randomly regenerating boffs (for example ones stuck in the mission log) got turned off a month or two ago, is this just a consequence of that?
There are 18 boffs, total. Half of which are Male/Female distinctions. Each of the 18 only gets 1 space trait, and that's the new hotness, so that should have been hand checked/tuned.
I appreciate that you've come out to say you aren't going to nerf the rare quality male romulan Tacticals or science, but the question is one of whether or not you're going to add very rare boffs that are strictly better onto the fleet vendor (either new boffs or adjustments to the existing ones there).
It would make the most sense if the boffs actually had deliberately tiered progression from the fleet vendor. For 160k fleet credits and 40k dil they probably should....
Whatever comes out of it, we appreciate you looking into it, though it would be really nice if you could let us know what the plan is at least, so we can decide if we want to spend our virtual money or hold off until apparently, more romulan boffs from other sources appear.
What I meant to explain was that we weren't intentionally making males better than females - and with the exception of the traits that were clearly class-specific (like Stasis Specialist), we didn't assign those based on class.
Sorry for the confusion; that was poor phrasing on my part.
The primary reason there's such a limited set of BOFFs is artwork; our artists only had time to make a limited number of variants on Romulan appearances. The more we make, the more duplication we'd run into, and it's awkward to have several BOFFs that look identical.
I changed the names from Covert Operative to Romulan Operative (to avoid confusion with Covert, which sounded too similar to Covert Operative). That wouldn't impact the quality of what's on the BOFFs themselves, though. It's possible another designer changed what traits were on the Uncommon BOFFs - I can check into that.
A problem easily solved by allowing for modification of the Boff's appearance. Instead...you made them all look identical. Wasn't that the situation you were trying to avoid?
That is to say, the Romulan Operative that is (incorrectly) associated with the Uncommon Romulan Tactical BOFF gives a value of 1.5%. Since there are no Basic Romulan Operatives (which should be Uncommon), I can't say if it's 1%. I believe, when I looked at the Male Rare Romulan Tactical BOFF, the value was 2%.
Again, it sounds like the Basic Operative got bumped off and all the higher traits were bumped down (again, incorrectly) to the next lower rarity.
This is probably contributing to why the Very Rare Tactical Officers have Subterfuge instead of Superior Operative.
It seems like the only correct Romulan Tactical Officer is the Female Rare Tactical BOFF with her Romulan Operative trait (even though the Male has the Superior Operative, incorrectly of course).
This made me laugh hard though. I hope you keep it!
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
I had assumed that Romulan Operative was limited to tactical on purpose for balance reasons, since if a crit chance and severity trait was potentially available on any career BOff I'd fill my bridge with 100% of that. Because my ship can't stealth subterfuge has 0 value to me, and it's therefore a downgrade to go from one of the blue Romulan tac BOffs to a purple one which seems backwards. That the blue male BOff has the better version of the trait further confuses things.
Can you see why the inconsistency with the space traits makes them very confusing for us?
For the ground traits, sure, whatever, but space traits actually make a difference in stuff people run at max level.
But well, the signature feature is the space stats.
Oh...I'm not in a fleet.
For the algorithm that decides a boff's quality when it picks a color for the roster, that's fine.
For an item that costs an exorbitant amount of dilithium and fleet credit, well, that's not fine. No one in their right mind would pay so much for a trait that isn't exclusive.
All superior traits may be equal in the algorithm, but they clearly *aren't* equal.
Why even bother with any sort of random generation? Theres only 18 bridge officers. Why not just give the Greens the Basic Trait, Blues the Regular Trait and the Purples the Superior trait. And repeat with the oter departments.
Because I really would love to have the Blue and Purple female Romulan Tactical BOffs but the only Blue that has the correct trait is the Male officer and the Purples just are wrong all over.
That's just silly. There is no reason to have used random allocation when the resulting output is so small. It would take the work of less than 10 minutes to go through the list and assign 3 of each category to each level of ability and make the actual use of the boffs mach their cost. If there were other methods of acquiring Romulan boffs it would make some sense but there is not.
Now, I will echo the sentiment of a previous poster and request some details on planned changes. I've already wasted a week's worth of dilithium and a pile of fleet credits on an officer that turned out to be completely useless (and apparently will remain so), so buying another one is not something I plan to do before we learn just how the Rommies will be handled.
Please keep in mind that these things take quite a bit of effort to acquire in game, and thus are not something to be changed around on a whim.