The one time I didn't use Word to spell check.....
Damn you Paris!
I was just giving him TRIBBLE because he wasn't bringing anything useful to the discussion, it wasn't a jab at you. By the way, doesn't your web browser underline misspelled words as you're typing them?
...I take what I said at the beginning back about how only the pro-grinders would start baring fangs. Looks like we're back to Square One with the debate portion of this issue. :rolleyes:
Cryptic has now defined the extreme EC/reward to be behavior that was not intended. It was not "normal", but a loophole that needed to be closed for the good of the game overall.
There is no valid debate now; Cryptic has metrics and numbers that we players can't see and made their decision accordingly. It's not credible to think that "3 or 4" foundry authors could sway Cryptic into making a change to something popular. The impact it was having on the economy and speeding up the grind that Cryptic put in place to slow players down somewhat is what lead to the change.
But those who want to make a fast buck by gaming the system without any real effort will never accept that.
So, I just checked my test map. I had an NPC space group set to 'timid', and as long as you stayed outside of around .5 km away from them, they wouldn't move. They were de-facto destructable objects, and a key part of an upcoming mission of mine.
Now, not only do they shoot back (which I could work into the mission easily), but they begin to maneuver even when my ship is kilometers away, effectively ruining the effect. I understand this effect was never intended, but it's rather upsetting to see hours of setting up a new type of foundry encounter from scratch go to waste.
Brandon, can you pass along that authors need a passive and immobile 'target' critter group in space(and maybe immobile 'turret' groups too)?My de-facto target group was just ruined by this patch. They weren't in a completed mission yet, but now this particular mission will likely be delayed quite a bit. I know many authors could find use for this sort of dummy target, and it could avoid the exploitation of the loot system.
Take a look at my Foundry missions! Conjoined, Re-emergence, and . . .
Cryptic has now defined the extreme EC/reward to be behavior that was not intended. It was not "normal", but a loophole that needed to be closed for the good of the game overall.
There is no valid debate now; Cryptic has metrics and numbers that we players can't see and made their decision accordingly. It's not credible to think that "3 or 4" foundry authors could sway Cryptic into making a change to something popular. The impact it was having on the economy and speeding up the grind that Cryptic put in place to slow players down somewhat is what lead to the change.
But those who want to make a fast buck by gaming the system without any real effort will never accept that.
Point taken. Then again, I really should step up my search for a zero-combat talkie mission and keep waiting out the IOP timer every time I clear it. At least that way, the Dil->Zen->Keys->EC method stays the same.
**** the fleet marks, though. I'm not in a fleet and they're still burning a hole in my pocket. :l
I was just giving him TRIBBLE because he wasn't bringing anything useful to the discussion, it wasn't a jab at you. By the way, doesn't your web browser underline misspelled words as you're typing them?
I know you were not, just having a bit of fun.
No it doesn't underline spelling errors unfortunately, as it would certainly save me some time.
Soooo... back to the discussion at hand, did anybody bring crackers?
Reading this thread I just quickly logged back in and gave Battleship Royale Rumble a go. Absolutely nothing has changed in this mission, and for 16 minutes of enjoyable blow stuff up (that fights back) action I received:
960 Dilithium
60 Fleet Marks (includes Fleet Mark Bonus Pool)
3600 Expertise
350,000 EC worth of dropped loot.
So... why all the complaining? Even sorting the loot out before selling it I still had 10 minutes to burn before the cooldown was done. So I should be easily able to run three toons through this an hour for
2880dil / 180 FM / 10800 EXP / 1,050,000 EC
Is this not enough?
How much is enough to stop this incesant whining?
At this rate there is going to be a severe cheese shortage.
I'm very happy about this to be honest, it means I'll get back to playing battleship royal rumble which is a very fun mission that I've enjoyed - instead of playing the one shot farm missions through pure laziness.
How did this change affect you farming marks and dilithium? This change only makes it harder to farm energy credits. And by harder I mean you actually have to fight the ships you're looting.
As I said, I never cared about loot. The exploit missions you are talking about, 7-10 waves of ships that dont fight back, you would only get loot up to the 5th or 6th wave, and then no loot or skill points for another 20 hours. Take all the loot out for all I care, it just slows down the process.
With cycling four characters, I could run the mission in 10 minutes, next guy, repeat etc. In a fleet of 3 people, this was the only feasible way to get fleet marks. Now, in the same span of time, I can run it once instead of 3 times. This is a big deal when I only have a hour or 2 to play during the week.
As I said, I never cared about loot. The exploit missions you are talking about, 7-10 waves of ships that dont fight back, you would only get loot up to the 5th or 6th wave, and then no loot or skill points for another 20 hours. Take all the loot out for all I care, it just slows down the process.
With cycling four characters, I could run the mission in 10 minutes, next guy, repeat etc. In a fleet of 3 people, this was the only feasible way to get fleet marks. Now, in the same span of time, I can run it once instead of 3 times. This is a big deal when I only have a hour or 2 to play during the week.
Keep your eyes open, there are still plenty of foundry missions that you can do this with despite the change to timid.
This change has just killed the STF Simulator/Test mission project I've been working on since Season 7 launched.
In the mission, I've had to use the 'timid creature' behaviour on enemy NPC groups to simulate generators/transformers/gates, because in an actual STF these items do not fight back and need destroying using the players weapons (in an ideal situation I'd have used destructible objects, but they're not in the foundry?).
There are many other mission/story scenarios I can imagine where we need NPCs that can be destroyed using player weapons that don't fight back. Should killing those pacifist NPCs drop loot? No, but the option needs to be there.
To be honest we need a range of behaviours that cover aggressive, neutral and pacifist that can be applied to NPC contacts and groups.
We also, desperately need destructible objects! In space and on ground, with a range of healths, or an author definable one.
Lastly, invisible targetable objects wouldn't go amiss. One scenario where these would come in handy is for firing warning shots, or shot where the player is meant to miss.
I want to be a foundry user, both as a player and author. I have so many ideas for missions I want to make, but when I go into the editor, 99% of the time I leave frustrated, because the assets/resources/tools I need to bring my missions to life are not there.
The few missions I was making progress on all involved the timid creature behaviour in some way, and now I'm back at square one :mad:
Post a list of questions and we'll see what we can do to help. Although, making a foundry missions as a replica of an STF seems a bit.... odd.
As I said, I never cared about loot. The exploit missions you are talking about, 7-10 waves of ships that dont fight back, you would only get loot up to the 5th or 6th wave, and then no loot or skill points for another 20 hours. Take all the loot out for all I care, it just slows down the process.
With cycling four characters, I could run the mission in 10 minutes, next guy, repeat etc. In a fleet of 3 people, this was the only feasible way to get fleet marks. Now, in the same span of time, I can run it once instead of 3 times. This is a big deal when I only have a hour or 2 to play during the week.
I can empathize with the fleet mark issue, even though I wholeheartedly agree with fixing this exploit. I run a small fleet (six players, many alts) of which I am the most active. We've pretty much given up on getting past tier 2 on our starbase (we're not quite there yet).
But I've discovered that I've ceased to care. Cryptic has substituted massive grinding for immersive episodic content. I'm not willing to spend my limited game time grinding loot. I'd rather replay the existing story missions and play Foundry missions.
Our little starbase and embassy will do well for RP and basic functionality. We really don't need much more, even though we would like it. But the Fleet system is designed with large fleets in mind, so those of us who don't want to be in large fleets are out of luck there.
And on the topic of the grind based game play, I think it's terrible. I'm not sure why anyone even bothers with it. So, you definitely have my sympathies, but turning the Foundry into a non-stop grind session is not going to fix that aspect of the game.
Meh, I use a Pokemon analogy. In both games you can easily get what you need to beat the story mode. But.... getting the best of the best for use in PvP?? heheh.... that's a major undertaking.
So, I just checked my test map. I had an NPC space group set to 'timid', and as long as you stayed outside of around .5 km away from them, they wouldn't move. They were de-facto destructable objects, and a key part of an upcoming mission of mine.
Now, not only do they shoot back (which I could work into the mission easily), but they begin to maneuver even when my ship is kilometers away, effectively ruining the effect. I understand this effect was never intended, but it's rather upsetting to see hours of setting up a new type of foundry encounter from scratch go to waste.
Brandon, can you pass along that authors need a passive and immobile 'target' critter group in space(and maybe immobile 'turret' groups too)?My de-facto target group was just ruined by this patch. They weren't in a completed mission yet, but now this particular mission will likely be delayed quite a bit. I know many authors could find use for this sort of dummy target, and it could avoid the exploitation of the loot system.
Yep, this totally breaks my STF Simulator. The firing back I could possibly have worked around, but the NPC groups that were stand-ins for the generators/tranformers/etc needed to remain immobile.
I don't think that's possible as I'm fairly certain that the type of loot is determined by the rank of the enemy (Ensign, Captain, Battleship, etc.) themselves. Authors just pick how they want that enemy to behave.
Coming from someone who programs games for a living, I can promise you it's very possible. That's assuming the loot generation system isn't a complete trainwreck, of course.
Coming from someone who programs games for a living, I can promise you it's very possible. That's assuming the loot generation system isn't a complete trainwreck, of course.
Come to think of it, the loot generation tables seem somewhat constant. It's just a matter of implementing it without the game engine itself going 'wait whoa what what whaaa?!' as far as I can figure out.
Coming from someone who programs games for a living, I can promise you it's very possible. That's assuming the loot generation system isn't a complete trainwreck, of course.
'It can be done in a game' is very, very different from 'it can be done without pulling our programmers away from something important'. Sure, maybe it's doable on short notice, but unless all games use similar architecture for loot determination, your expertise doesn't shed any light on how open the existing game code at Cryptic is to this sort of change. Maybe that's a 'trainwreck' to you, but maybe it's plain as day to the guy who knows it (but is currently busy doing other things).
Take a look at my Foundry missions! Conjoined, Re-emergence, and . . .
Keep your eyes open, there are still plenty of foundry missions that you can do this with despite the change to timid.
There are yes, and I like to do those on the weekend when I have more time. In fact, I really enjoy many of the missions. I am not one of those people that do the foundry JUST for the loot. I think a lot of these foundry writers are really quite talented. I especially liked the one with the ancient ship that was miles long that you had to wander through and help it escape the borg.
However, if the problem people had with it was people farming it for EC, it wasn't really an issue, and I don't see how this change really combats that problem. Tour the Universe happens once, sometimes twice a day and in one hour you can get 3 mil EC. Foundry farming got you 500 - 750k in 30 minutes once every 20 hours. If loot was the issue, you still get plenty from battleship royal rumble. But now, me, and those like me are being punished because some loud voices were whining about something they didn't understand wasn't even that profitable. Remove the loot, please, but revert the change. The end game has become nothing but a horrid grind. ANYTHING that gives us a slight ease to that suffering, I am all for.
The foundry isn't worthless now, it wasn't created to be farmed. It was created to tell stories.
The Foundry is there for people to make the maps the way they want, If they want to tell a story that is their choice, if they want to make a map so they can farm that is also their choice, the one that make the map want ships to act a certain way and sometime even in a story having a ship not fire back could be part of it but now that option is taken as way by those few who wine about it, if you don't like something don't play that map plain and simple, but scr*w it up for every one else.
Post a list of questions and we'll see what we can do to help. Although, making a foundry missions as a replica of an STF seems a bit.... odd.
The STF Simulator mission is/was initially designed to test prospective ship builds for use in STFs on the tribble test server, before making potentially expensive changes and requisitions on the holodeck live server.
Initially it was just going to be a very rough approximation of the STFs, several rounds of Borg mobs.
As I was developing the project though it occurred to me it could also serve as a tutorial/practice ground for those new to STFs. Complete newcomers to STFs are rarely welcomed on holodeck, PUGs may be willing accept a newcomer in Normal runs, but you rise to Elite runs (which is where the money is) and Premade/EliteSTFs channel, and the slightest mistake is heavily chastised.
Finding 4 other players willing to sacrifice a cooldown or risk failing the optional because of a bad ship build or lack of knowledge is difficult enough on holodeck, on tribble its nigh impossible.
So the project aimed to become more representitive of the actual STFs. There were things I immediately realised I couldn't do, timers, failing objectives. But the maps were there, a few assets were missing, so substitutions were made and could be explained in dialogue.
I was making good progress, having found I could swap versions of items on objective complete to prevent players from targetting things they shouldn't and playing out of sequence, and I discovered the 'timid creature' behaviour worked as a substitute destructible object. That was, until the patch.
The Foundry is there for people to make the maps the way they want, If they want to tell a story that is their choice, if they want to make a map so they can farm that is also their choice, the one that make the map want ships to act a certain way and sometime even in a story having a ship not fire back could be part of it but now that option is taken as way by those few who wine about it, if you don't like something don't play that map plain and simple, but scr*w it up for every one else.
You're wrong actually. Players are allowed to create what they want within the parameters set by Cryptic. Those parameters have changed. Besides, they can make whatever map they want, but doesn't necessarily mean that it can be farmed by the players the way the creator intends it to be. I don't want the timid setting taken away either, but be mad at the exploiters that caused it. Hopefully this is only a temporary quick fix to the problem, and we'll get the timid setting back the way it was. Though I hope we can also have a new setting as it is now in addition. Both would be useful.
Also, by attacking my post, you're defending the guy I was responding to. Are you suggesting he's right for saying that the foundry is useless now that you can't as easily farm it for energy credits? I think you should pick your battles more carefully, otherwise people may think your only interest in the foundry is truly the exploit potential.
The STF Simulator mission is/was initially designed to test prospective ship builds for use in STFs on the tribble test server, before making potentially expensive changes and requisitions on the holodeck live server.
Initially it was just going to be a very rough approximation of the STFs, several rounds of Borg mobs.
As I was developing the project though it occurred to me it could also serve as a tutorial/practice ground for those new to STFs. Complete newcomers to STFs are rarely welcomed on holodeck, PUGs may be willing accept a newcomer in Normal runs, but you rise to Elite runs (which is where the money is) and Premade/EliteSTFs channel, and the slightest mistake is heavily chastised.
Finding 4 other players willing to sacrifice a cooldown or risk failing the optional because of a bad ship build or lack of knowledge is difficult enough on holodeck, on tribble its nigh impossible.
So the project aimed to become more representitive of the actual STFs. There were things I immediately realised I couldn't do, timers, failing objectives. But the maps were there, a few assets were missing, so substitutions were made and could be explained in dialogue.
I was making good progress, having found I could swap versions of items on objective complete to prevent players from targetting things they shouldn't and playing out of sequence, and I discovered the 'timid creature' behaviour worked as a substitute destructible object. That was, until the patch.
I didn't mean long story missions necessarily. If you don't care about the loot for EC then you shouldn't have any problems doing your normal routine.
I can empathize with the fleet mark issue, even though I wholeheartedly agree with fixing this exploit. I run a small fleet (six players, many alts) of which I am the most active. We've pretty much given up on getting past tier 2 on our starbase (we're not quite there yet).
But I've discovered that I've ceased to care. Cryptic has substituted massive grinding for immersive episodic content. I'm not willing to spend my limited game time grinding loot. I'd rather replay the existing story missions and play Foundry missions.
Our little starbase and embassy will do well for RP and basic functionality. We really don't need much more, even though we would like it. But the Fleet system is designed with large fleets in mind, so those of us who don't want to be in large fleets are out of luck there.
Smartest thing I've seen posted on this topic in ages. Very good.
The Foundry is there for people to make the maps the way they want, If they want to tell a story that is their choice, if they want to make a map so they can farm that is also their choice, the one that make the map want ships to act a certain way and sometime even in a story having a ship not fire back could be part of it but now that option is taken as way by those few who wine about it, if you don't like something don't play that map plain and simple, but scr*w it up for every one else.
Actually, the fact is Cryptic designed the Foundry to tell stories. They wouldn't have bothered to put as much effort into the Foundry editor in STO and NW if all they expected was for people to use it to kill 25 battleships. The very first version of the Foundry could do that already, so they could have stopped expending resources on it a couple years ago, if that's all they wanted it to do.
'It can be done in a game' is very, very different from 'it can be done without pulling our programmers away from something important'. Sure, maybe it's doable on short notice, but unless all games use similar architecture for loot determination, your expertise doesn't shed any light on how open the existing game code at Cryptic is to this sort of change. Maybe that's a 'trainwreck' to you, but maybe it's plain as day to the guy who knows it (but is currently busy doing other things).
I'd actually consider something like "giving foundry developers an exploit-free version of creatures that don't attack back" (as in, more design options) along the lines of "something important." After all, how many people enjoy playing and building with the foundry? A lot.
In the land of OOP, an object (in this case, an enemy creature or ship) consists of properties--variables representing things like health, level, etc. Among these is likely behavior, as the game needs to know if the enemy is going to attack the player immediately when it enters range, only when it is attacked first, or not at all...right?
Now, let's look at what we know about the loot system: To assess it as simply as possible, it drops loot based on enemy level...at the defeated enemy's last location. So obviously, the loot generation system has access to each individual enemy object (when killed) and thus, its properties, including: x, y, z, (for loot placement) and level (for the loot's mk level). It really could be as simple as changing something like GenerateLoot(); into if (behaviorType != timid) GenerateLoot(); (This is psuedocode of course, but you get the idea--basically the loot generation would simply check for the timid personality type and, if present, skip the creation of loot)
So unless the loot generation system really was coded in a messy fashion, this should not be a hard change. Nearly every MMO on the market has some sort of enemy that is flagged somehow to never drop loot.
Meh. To hell with em. Foundry is useless now. Just convert dilith into zen, buy keys, sell em on the exchange. Or if you got real $$ to toss, there are dozens of websites around that you can buy EC per dollar a bit cheaper than Zen > Keys per dollar.
I deleted my foundry mission and at this point in time not going to bother spending more time with foundry missions. I don't like the idea of having to constantly edit missions because their functionality was altered on a whim.
If you don't want people to farm timid npcs for loot, then alter them so they do not drop loot. That would not have forced all the foundry authors to alter their missions because now all the timid NPCs are swarming death squads.
Also, there is an opportunity cost in MMOs, the factor is time. Someone can spend X minutes doing an STF for rep, marks, great loot, etc or they can spend time on foundry missions for very limited mediocre vendor trash loot.
I do not think it is desirable to make foundry missions less appealing. By all means get rid of exploits and improve functionality, but if you are just going to make the time invested in foundry missions even less appealing than standard content then why bother?
Combat foundry missions do not sound as appealing to play and even less appealing to create.
i am kind of glad they did something about the farming issue. so now i can't farm for ec toi save up to pay 88millon for a ship box now. isn't that price farming in it's own right, with out farming how would u get that much money, o yah multiple characters well thats farming 2 so nerf that MAKE IT SO U CAN"T TRANSFER MONEY< ITEMS<AND DILITHUM , then maybe i wouldn't have to spend 88 mill for something on the exchange, and u should nerf the exchange 2 if something is worth 20000 in the decription then the most u should be able to sell it for is 30000 50% more then it's worth, and the big thing ships bind them to charcater
That is a naive view of MMO economics.
The problem with MMOs is that money keeps flooding into the economy and the money sinks do not come close to balancing the economy so people who play for longer just accumulate more money. Most of the guys I know who have played for years don't play foundry missions at all and are at the EC cap a long time ago and have to keep purchasing items because they can't receive any more EC.
They buy keys, they buy the nice ships, they buy anything of value and they play STFs and the money comes back and they have to spend it again. The more money they have, the more they are prepared to pay for items, this causes inflation because they have more game currency than they know what to do with so it devalues the currency and it means newer players and the inept have to find ridiculous amounts of EC to compete and there is no way someone playing for a few weeks or months can compete with someone who has accumulated currency for years.
The problem was there before foundry and this change has done nothing other than make it even harder for newer players to compete with the old money players.
Comments
The one time I didn't use Word to spell check.....
Damn you Paris!
Meh. Keeps the flavor intact. You don't ruin a good burger by adding sugar.
I was just giving him TRIBBLE because he wasn't bringing anything useful to the discussion, it wasn't a jab at you. By the way, doesn't your web browser underline misspelled words as you're typing them?
Cryptic has now defined the extreme EC/reward to be behavior that was not intended. It was not "normal", but a loophole that needed to be closed for the good of the game overall.
There is no valid debate now; Cryptic has metrics and numbers that we players can't see and made their decision accordingly. It's not credible to think that "3 or 4" foundry authors could sway Cryptic into making a change to something popular. The impact it was having on the economy and speeding up the grind that Cryptic put in place to slow players down somewhat is what lead to the change.
But those who want to make a fast buck by gaming the system without any real effort will never accept that.
Now, not only do they shoot back (which I could work into the mission easily), but they begin to maneuver even when my ship is kilometers away, effectively ruining the effect. I understand this effect was never intended, but it's rather upsetting to see hours of setting up a new type of foundry encounter from scratch go to waste.
Brandon, can you pass along that authors need a passive and immobile 'target' critter group in space(and maybe immobile 'turret' groups too)? My de-facto target group was just ruined by this patch. They weren't in a completed mission yet, but now this particular mission will likely be delayed quite a bit. I know many authors could find use for this sort of dummy target, and it could avoid the exploitation of the loot system.
Conjoined, Re-emergence, and . . .
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Point taken. Then again, I really should step up my search for a zero-combat talkie mission and keep waiting out the IOP timer every time I clear it. At least that way, the Dil->Zen->Keys->EC method stays the same.
**** the fleet marks, though. I'm not in a fleet and they're still burning a hole in my pocket. :l
I know you were not, just having a bit of fun.
No it doesn't underline spelling errors unfortunately, as it would certainly save me some time.
Soooo... back to the discussion at hand, did anybody bring crackers?
I'm very happy about this to be honest, it means I'll get back to playing battleship royal rumble which is a very fun mission that I've enjoyed - instead of playing the one shot farm missions through pure laziness.
Kirk's Protege.
As I said, I never cared about loot. The exploit missions you are talking about, 7-10 waves of ships that dont fight back, you would only get loot up to the 5th or 6th wave, and then no loot or skill points for another 20 hours. Take all the loot out for all I care, it just slows down the process.
With cycling four characters, I could run the mission in 10 minutes, next guy, repeat etc. In a fleet of 3 people, this was the only feasible way to get fleet marks. Now, in the same span of time, I can run it once instead of 3 times. This is a big deal when I only have a hour or 2 to play during the week.
Keep your eyes open, there are still plenty of foundry missions that you can do this with despite the change to timid.
My character Tsin'xing
I can empathize with the fleet mark issue, even though I wholeheartedly agree with fixing this exploit. I run a small fleet (six players, many alts) of which I am the most active. We've pretty much given up on getting past tier 2 on our starbase (we're not quite there yet).
But I've discovered that I've ceased to care. Cryptic has substituted massive grinding for immersive episodic content. I'm not willing to spend my limited game time grinding loot. I'd rather replay the existing story missions and play Foundry missions.
Our little starbase and embassy will do well for RP and basic functionality. We really don't need much more, even though we would like it. But the Fleet system is designed with large fleets in mind, so those of us who don't want to be in large fleets are out of luck there.
My character Tsin'xing
Yep, this totally breaks my STF Simulator. The firing back I could possibly have worked around, but the NPC groups that were stand-ins for the generators/tranformers/etc needed to remain immobile.
No, but I have a bottle of Cockburn's Special Reserve:P
Commander, Starfleet Corps of Engineers • 7th Fleet
Commanding Officer, U.S.S. HEART OF OAK • NX-1759-B • Odyssey class Star Cruiser ( Lexington Tactical Configuration))
(Steam - feel free to follow/friend me : )
Come to think of it, the loot generation tables seem somewhat constant. It's just a matter of implementing it without the game engine itself going 'wait whoa what what whaaa?!' as far as I can figure out.
So Amarelo, Brie/Camembert, Double Gloucester, Lancashire, Roquefort & Stilton, or Sao Jorge?
'It can be done in a game' is very, very different from 'it can be done without pulling our programmers away from something important'. Sure, maybe it's doable on short notice, but unless all games use similar architecture for loot determination, your expertise doesn't shed any light on how open the existing game code at Cryptic is to this sort of change. Maybe that's a 'trainwreck' to you, but maybe it's plain as day to the guy who knows it (but is currently busy doing other things).
Conjoined, Re-emergence, and . . .
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
There are yes, and I like to do those on the weekend when I have more time. In fact, I really enjoy many of the missions. I am not one of those people that do the foundry JUST for the loot. I think a lot of these foundry writers are really quite talented. I especially liked the one with the ancient ship that was miles long that you had to wander through and help it escape the borg.
However, if the problem people had with it was people farming it for EC, it wasn't really an issue, and I don't see how this change really combats that problem. Tour the Universe happens once, sometimes twice a day and in one hour you can get 3 mil EC. Foundry farming got you 500 - 750k in 30 minutes once every 20 hours. If loot was the issue, you still get plenty from battleship royal rumble. But now, me, and those like me are being punished because some loud voices were whining about something they didn't understand wasn't even that profitable. Remove the loot, please, but revert the change. The end game has become nothing but a horrid grind. ANYTHING that gives us a slight ease to that suffering, I am all for.
The Foundry is there for people to make the maps the way they want, If they want to tell a story that is their choice, if they want to make a map so they can farm that is also their choice, the one that make the map want ships to act a certain way and sometime even in a story having a ship not fire back could be part of it but now that option is taken as way by those few who wine about it, if you don't like something don't play that map plain and simple, but scr*w it up for every one else.
The STF Simulator mission is/was initially designed to test prospective ship builds for use in STFs on the tribble test server, before making potentially expensive changes and requisitions on the holodeck live server.
Initially it was just going to be a very rough approximation of the STFs, several rounds of Borg mobs.
As I was developing the project though it occurred to me it could also serve as a tutorial/practice ground for those new to STFs. Complete newcomers to STFs are rarely welcomed on holodeck, PUGs may be willing accept a newcomer in Normal runs, but you rise to Elite runs (which is where the money is) and Premade/EliteSTFs channel, and the slightest mistake is heavily chastised.
Finding 4 other players willing to sacrifice a cooldown or risk failing the optional because of a bad ship build or lack of knowledge is difficult enough on holodeck, on tribble its nigh impossible.
So the project aimed to become more representitive of the actual STFs. There were things I immediately realised I couldn't do, timers, failing objectives. But the maps were there, a few assets were missing, so substitutions were made and could be explained in dialogue.
I was making good progress, having found I could swap versions of items on objective complete to prevent players from targetting things they shouldn't and playing out of sequence, and I discovered the 'timid creature' behaviour worked as a substitute destructible object. That was, until the patch.
Commander, Starfleet Corps of Engineers • 7th Fleet
Commanding Officer, U.S.S. HEART OF OAK • NX-1759-B • Odyssey class Star Cruiser ( Lexington Tactical Configuration))
(Steam - feel free to follow/friend me : )
You're wrong actually. Players are allowed to create what they want within the parameters set by Cryptic. Those parameters have changed. Besides, they can make whatever map they want, but doesn't necessarily mean that it can be farmed by the players the way the creator intends it to be. I don't want the timid setting taken away either, but be mad at the exploiters that caused it. Hopefully this is only a temporary quick fix to the problem, and we'll get the timid setting back the way it was. Though I hope we can also have a new setting as it is now in addition. Both would be useful.
Also, by attacking my post, you're defending the guy I was responding to. Are you suggesting he's right for saying that the foundry is useless now that you can't as easily farm it for energy credits? I think you should pick your battles more carefully, otherwise people may think your only interest in the foundry is truly the exploit potential.
I didn't mean long story missions necessarily. If you don't care about the loot for EC then you shouldn't have any problems doing your normal routine.
Smartest thing I've seen posted on this topic in ages. Very good.
Actually, the fact is Cryptic designed the Foundry to tell stories. They wouldn't have bothered to put as much effort into the Foundry editor in STO and NW if all they expected was for people to use it to kill 25 battleships. The very first version of the Foundry could do that already, so they could have stopped expending resources on it a couple years ago, if that's all they wanted it to do.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
In the land of OOP, an object (in this case, an enemy creature or ship) consists of properties--variables representing things like health, level, etc. Among these is likely behavior, as the game needs to know if the enemy is going to attack the player immediately when it enters range, only when it is attacked first, or not at all...right?
Now, let's look at what we know about the loot system: To assess it as simply as possible, it drops loot based on enemy level...at the defeated enemy's last location. So obviously, the loot generation system has access to each individual enemy object (when killed) and thus, its properties, including: x, y, z, (for loot placement) and level (for the loot's mk level). It really could be as simple as changing something like GenerateLoot(); into if (behaviorType != timid) GenerateLoot(); (This is psuedocode of course, but you get the idea--basically the loot generation would simply check for the timid personality type and, if present, skip the creation of loot)
So unless the loot generation system really was coded in a messy fashion, this should not be a hard change. Nearly every MMO on the market has some sort of enemy that is flagged somehow to never drop loot.
If you don't want people to farm timid npcs for loot, then alter them so they do not drop loot. That would not have forced all the foundry authors to alter their missions because now all the timid NPCs are swarming death squads.
Also, there is an opportunity cost in MMOs, the factor is time. Someone can spend X minutes doing an STF for rep, marks, great loot, etc or they can spend time on foundry missions for very limited mediocre vendor trash loot.
I do not think it is desirable to make foundry missions less appealing. By all means get rid of exploits and improve functionality, but if you are just going to make the time invested in foundry missions even less appealing than standard content then why bother?
Combat foundry missions do not sound as appealing to play and even less appealing to create.
That is a naive view of MMO economics.
The problem with MMOs is that money keeps flooding into the economy and the money sinks do not come close to balancing the economy so people who play for longer just accumulate more money. Most of the guys I know who have played for years don't play foundry missions at all and are at the EC cap a long time ago and have to keep purchasing items because they can't receive any more EC.
They buy keys, they buy the nice ships, they buy anything of value and they play STFs and the money comes back and they have to spend it again. The more money they have, the more they are prepared to pay for items, this causes inflation because they have more game currency than they know what to do with so it devalues the currency and it means newer players and the inept have to find ridiculous amounts of EC to compete and there is no way someone playing for a few weeks or months can compete with someone who has accumulated currency for years.
The problem was there before foundry and this change has done nothing other than make it even harder for newer players to compete with the old money players.