STO was a great game when it was built around attacks and counters to those attacks via reacting. It still IS a great game. It's just maybe not working quite that way.
Well why would anyone say that?
First, is it a game of action/reaction? (or more properly, did it use to be?) Of course. The game has plenty of actions. Firing phasers. There's an action. Firing Torpedoes. There's another. Beam overload and High Yield. There's more. Those are all actions. And there are reactions. Brace for impact. Emergency Power to Shields. Transfer Shield Strength. And those are reactions, but are they really?
Well they certainly COULD be. You could see some torpedoes coming and sure you could Brace. You could take some fire to your shields and for some reason you haven't exploded and you could Transfer Shield Strength. So certainly they could be reactions. And if you DIDN'T react in time you could then be in Very Serious Trouble!
You could further argure that every heal in the game is a reaction. Cant heal if you didn't take damage and furthermore you would need to SURVIVE that damage if you're now around to heal it!
Okay well we should have some sort of sense of time for all this to happen inside of. Things take time right? Somewhere in here we could say that a player has a certain amount of time to begin to react to a situation before it spirals out of control. Before it becomes just plain to late. Where some damage is taken, but a player could just use the ship controls to survive. Swap power to shields, manually distribute, turn his ship. Things of THAT nature. Not "pop RSP instantly".
This is just a TOTAL guess. But with CRF being one of the shortest most powerful attacks I will say that the timeframe MUST fit inside of CRF's duration. And that's likely far to short.
But it was THERE. There was a timeframe that a defender had. Had. That's gone now.
Okay what makes anyone say that the timeframe has gone. Or if it hasn't "gone" it has shrunk to the point it is virtually meaningless to many players.
Tactical Team and Emergency Power to Shields, that's why. There is a large contingent of players that push using these to abilites as often as possible, proactively. EPS that's easy. TT not so much but you can greatly increase its uptime so the uncovered gap is about 5 seconds or so? Some expert on that will chime in. Still you can see the push is to have TT as often as possible, and EPS always. Well there must be a reason. That method of play IS out there. It is posted on fairly often. No one ever says anything to the contrary.
Well why is that? Why would a game obviously built around action/reaction now require a response team ability and and emergency power ability to be run full time?
Because the players know that at any moment that they don't have those abilities running thier ship is in grievous danger. More damage can come in faster than they could ever react to and the innate abilites of even a full health ship will not save them. And that's true and it can and has been demonstrated over and over and over that even a full health ship will blow up with ease under those circumstances.
And it doesn't MATTER that it doesn't happen every five seconds. It doesnt MATTER that it doesn't happen to you because YOU keep TT up as often as possible or that YOU can keep your trigger finger over that button or that YOU fly on a team with extends.
What does matter is that those things ARE in the game and it HAS pushed the players into a spot where if they don't proactively defend themselves to a very high degree they could simply "vanish". So now its no longer action/reaction. Sure that's THERE. But only if you survive the first blow. And to survive the first blow you need to have.......right. You got it. You need to be running reaction type abilites before anything has happened to react to.
Huh well thats wierd. How in the world of STO did we get to a place where Cruisers and Carriers can be one shot?
Here's a hint. Don't blame Doffs! Don't blame the rep system! It isn't gear sets! Not Boff's! Not captain abilities! But it is where those things derive from.
It would be interesting to test (on Tribble?) a universal doubling of hull and/or shield values, and tweak from there.
On the other hand, there are already ships that can tank a ton of fire... the more general problem is that STO isn't good at limiting the 'extremes' - there need to be more hard caps on every buff and debuff.
_________________________________________________ [Kluless][Kold][Steel Heels][Snagtooth] [Louis Cipher][Outta Gum][Thysa Kymbo][Spanner][Frakk] [D'Mented][D'Licious]
Joined October 2009. READ BEFORE POSTING
It is probably completely impossible to rebalance the game at this point without massively restricting what doffs and special consoles can do.
Due to special consoles (and also hybrid boff layouts), many powerful abilities are not restricted to certain ship classes anymore. So it's difficult to balance these abilities against the hull/shield/movement restrictions of a certain ship class.
Due to Doffs (and in reverse direction due to AoE cooldown increasing temporal lobi sets), you never know at what value the cooldown of a Boff ability will actually end up (without any inherent balance in form of occupied boff slots due to doubling-up on abilities to reduce cooldowns). This makes balancing the impact of an ability very hard since you never really know how often the ability will be available.
Due to resist skills in the skill tree, you never know whether an ability will fire with full force or only a fraction of the planned power.
Cryptic has introduced way too many variables that have increased the variance of abilities. In its oldest (pre-F2P/SpecialConsole) form - the huge boosts to damage from abilities -, this variance has led to always-on EPtS becoming a necessity to slightly reduce the gap between buffed and unbuffed weapons hitting one's ship. In its more recent incarnations, this variance has led to the demise of shield stripping powers (CPB/TachBeam) and the rise of "everyone can heal through almost everything".
I would like to add to what Mancom said by reminding Cryptic that the original game incarnation was clearly balanced around rather specific cooldowns. Unlike other MMOs or similar games, STO has strictly-regimented skills that are designed to offset each other during the general ebb and flow of a given map instance. Damage pushes and defense pulls, etc.
The timeships and other cooldown-reducing/inflating gear, equipment or DOff options are severely breaking the flow of the game and dragging it into uncharted waters. STO's poor compatibility with cooldown reduction could be seen most clearly during the Romulan Embassy DOff bug: users of these DOffs were extremely difficult to counter as player ships were not designed to withstand the firepower of ~24 second interval Alphas or Subnukes.
Now, this is not to say that cooldown reduction/inflation strategies have no place in the game. I'm sure if properly play-tested and trialled before release, such items would be more than welcome within the current ruleset. The problem, as always, is that said items clearly weren't fully tested, and the game has greatly suffered as a result.
STO's poor compatibility with cooldown reduction could be seen most clearly during the Romulan Embassy DOff bug: users of these DOffs were extremely difficult to counter as player ships were not designed to withstand the firepower of ~24 second interval Alphas or Subnukes.
that was fixed weeks ago.
you can counter apa easier than you can counter subnuc :rolleyes:
What amazes me about STO is how incredibly good and stable the initial design (and also S1.2) was. When we got the reworked TT, it essentially quadrupled everyone's shields! And yet, the game remained playable.
Unfortunately the current devs seem to be primarily interested in figuring out just how many hay bales you can load on this camel's back before it finally breaks.
But yeah, it's probably time to look at the state of things when what used to be counters are now maintained as a baseline. There is no longer an E in EPTS. I remember back in the day Cryptic said they had to choose between everybody being a captain and everybody starting as an ensign pushing buttons in main engineering. Well, we're kind of there. I actually do spend time just pushing buttons to cycle EPTx.
Er. Muh. Gerd. This hurts so badly to watch because I want STO to be awesome. It just makes me flash back to things like the temporal time out. I ranted that any time a player is put in a situation without a counter, a situation where removing their hands from the keyboard will have the same effect as leaving them there, that it was inherently bad for the game. And then there's the part in the vid about testing it rigorously. We were assured that nothing could hurt you in the temporal field so it wasn't really a stun, but then we got temporal tric'ing. It hurts, it really does, to see the advice is "Use your brain, think it through, and test it."
Watching that vid on balanced game design was like listening to great advice from a psychologist on how to build healthy relationships while thinking that I can't wait to get back to my girlfriend so she can empty my bank account and step on my balls some more.
_______________ CommanderDonatra@Capt.Sisko: ahhh is it supposed to do that? Norvo Tigan@dontdrunkimshoot: hell ya, maybe
Watching that vid on balanced game design was like listening to great advice from a psychologist on how to build healthy relationships while thinking that I can't wait to get back to my girlfriend so she can empty my bank account and step on my balls some more.
But the point is still well stated. It somehwat lacks these days in STO.
Co-founder of The Spanish Inquisition TSI - Cause no one expects it!
PaxOttomana: gawd mirror event is like fighting a tsi premade, they keep comin and comin!
It is probably completely impossible to rebalance the game at this point without massively restricting what doffs and special consoles can do.
Setting caps on buffs/debuffs would allow balancing without needing to touch (almost) anything. For example, if weapon damage could only be buffed by X%, you would be able to choose how to get there thru some mixture of tac consoles, buffs, etc. Hell, Cryptic could make it possible for any type of captain to reach any of the caps.
And diversity of builds increases - if you only need 3 tac consoles to hit the cap on energy weapons, you could finally dust off those torpedo consoles.
And special consoles just get you to a given cap faster, or with a different console slot. So a "slow" special console might impose the maximum "slow" debuff without using a BO slot for a tractor beam.
_________________________________________________ [Kluless][Kold][Steel Heels][Snagtooth] [Louis Cipher][Outta Gum][Thysa Kymbo][Spanner][Frakk] [D'Mented][D'Licious]
Joined October 2009. READ BEFORE POSTING
Piloting matters too. Cannons for example have a travel time as do torps, where beams are near instant after an activation time. This means the damage can be spread out w/distance allowing for manual rebalancing of shields and repairs on cooldowns to come back. I've done this w/a Vo'quv w/combat engines of all things while hindering the alpha source's movement.
Also, audio cues often give a heads up of an incoming alphas. BOs have a longer activation time and the audio cue starts at the beginning of the activation. Torps have a travel time and the audio cue helps.
I don't prebuff my teams and run 2-3 team types on nearly all my builds. I'll often only run w/1 copy of TT including non-aux2batt builds. I'm able to do this by piloting, having other Boff counters, and listening.
This doesn't mean my ship doesn't explode, it happens but (lag spikes aside) it's b/c the otherside played better, I was attempting to buy time for allies and sac'd myself, or I got tunnel vision and wasn't paying attention to what else was going on around me (usually the cause of my death b/c I prefer a hit and run playstyle and get stubborn and don't run when I should).
[Zone] Dack@****: cowards can't take a fed 1 on 1 crinckley cowards Hahahaha you smell like flowers
Random Quote from Kerrat
"Sumlobus@****: your mums eat Iced Targ Poo"
C&H Fed banter
What I have always loved about sto... was the very active buffs.
This game of all the mmos I have played has some of the shortest cool downs one everything.
Even powerful captain abilities have no more then 3 min cool downs. Pretty much every other mmo ever made has much slower buff cycles.
I think it is part of the magic that keeps us coming back here despite all the other issues we complain about. STO is fast paced. (or at least it used to be) Don't get me wrong I never felt like it was some space shooter... it still felt very trek to me. (I know some people claimed the speed was untrek)... I think it had a nice balance. If you made an error with a buff there was ways to correct things before it was to late... ect.
Now we have a game where the devs seem to have decided that the very fast buff system we had wasn't fast enough. How else do you explain every second item/doff release having some sort of cool down reduction.
It has gotten to a point where there is no more point counter point... because frankly everything is always on. Having most buffs cooled down to global is pretty much a reality these days... you can get there with Tech doffs, dmg control doffs, all the weapons doffs, time sets, lockbox ships with more boff slots, fleet deflectors, all the sci skill doffs, Attack Pattern doffs.
Of all the changes the devs have made in the last year or so... its the cool down changes that have had the most impact imo... mostly it has completely removed the point counter point system... the heal reductions have made well built sci ships darn near unkillable... it has made escorts extremely tanky by freeing up tac slots, while increasing uptimes on high level attack patterns, and Emergency power systems. (lets all be honest with ourselves now... my escort has EPTS 1 and EPTE 1 up 100% of the time... and omega 3 up 50% of the time, delta is up when omega isn't and I run a aux to damp just in case I really need some turn.... there is no looking for the gaps in my buffs anymore cause there isn't one).
In any event I don't mean to turn this into a 2 page rant. I have found PvP to be less and less enjoyable in STO the last year... at first I blamed that on p2w consoles, and even ships. The more I think about it however, I think it really comes down to the dumbing down of the PvP game. The need for timing has been reduces... the value in watching buff bars has been lessened. (yes its still important... but there is no more counting off your enemies buff bars... cause likely when it ends it will just be reapplied)
With out annoying alot of people by completely changing a ton of doffs, items, and even ships... I can't think of anyway to bring that back. I honestly fear these types of threads are pretty much a post mortum at his point. It might be time for Cryptic to take note of where they let it go off the rails so they don't make the same mistake with there future titles.
They could cap cooldown reduction and/or increase the global cooldowns.
The problem now is not any single special doff, console or whatever, it's that they all add together with no limit.
_________________________________________________ [Kluless][Kold][Steel Heels][Snagtooth] [Louis Cipher][Outta Gum][Thysa Kymbo][Spanner][Frakk] [D'Mented][D'Licious]
Joined October 2009. READ BEFORE POSTING
What's wrong with the game is a cumulative effect of so many, so so so many, so many things. They keep lumping more and more on - without considering how those pieces may or may not work together. They delude themselves into believing that they're offering an opportunity cost - but that cost's not there. Things aren't anywhere near balanced enough for there to be an opportunity cost in most cases.
And more's going to be added.
At what point do they just make all buffs active and give everybody SNB DOFFs - so with a mix of lucky RNG from a few sources, folks might get the kill? How much of the game already revolves around VM, SNB, and other various lucky procs because as was stated earlier in the thread - folks are running around near perma buffed - where they still have stuff in reserve for the gaps...or maybe they even have some RNG defensive proc.
Comments
On the other hand, there are already ships that can tank a ton of fire... the more general problem is that STO isn't good at limiting the 'extremes' - there need to be more hard caps on every buff and debuff.
[Kluless][Kold][Steel Heels][Snagtooth]
[Louis Cipher][Outta Gum][Thysa Kymbo][Spanner][Frakk]
[D'Mented][D'Licious]
Joined October 2009. READ BEFORE POSTING
Due to special consoles (and also hybrid boff layouts), many powerful abilities are not restricted to certain ship classes anymore. So it's difficult to balance these abilities against the hull/shield/movement restrictions of a certain ship class.
Due to Doffs (and in reverse direction due to AoE cooldown increasing temporal lobi sets), you never know at what value the cooldown of a Boff ability will actually end up (without any inherent balance in form of occupied boff slots due to doubling-up on abilities to reduce cooldowns). This makes balancing the impact of an ability very hard since you never really know how often the ability will be available.
Due to resist skills in the skill tree, you never know whether an ability will fire with full force or only a fraction of the planned power.
Cryptic has introduced way too many variables that have increased the variance of abilities. In its oldest (pre-F2P/SpecialConsole) form - the huge boosts to damage from abilities -, this variance has led to always-on EPtS becoming a necessity to slightly reduce the gap between buffed and unbuffed weapons hitting one's ship. In its more recent incarnations, this variance has led to the demise of shield stripping powers (CPB/TachBeam) and the rise of "everyone can heal through almost everything".
The timeships and other cooldown-reducing/inflating gear, equipment or DOff options are severely breaking the flow of the game and dragging it into uncharted waters. STO's poor compatibility with cooldown reduction could be seen most clearly during the Romulan Embassy DOff bug: users of these DOffs were extremely difficult to counter as player ships were not designed to withstand the firepower of ~24 second interval Alphas or Subnukes.
Now, this is not to say that cooldown reduction/inflation strategies have no place in the game. I'm sure if properly play-tested and trialled before release, such items would be more than welcome within the current ruleset. The problem, as always, is that said items clearly weren't fully tested, and the game has greatly suffered as a result.
vids and guides and stuff
[9:52] [Zone #11] Neal@trapper1532: im a omega force shadow oprative and a maoc elite camander and here i am taking water samples
that was fixed weeks ago.
you can counter apa easier than you can counter subnuc :rolleyes:
Unfortunately the current devs seem to be primarily interested in figuring out just how many hay bales you can load on this camel's back before it finally breaks.
It was just an example that I felt many would likely be able to relate to. I actually don't think those DOffs are even close to the worst offender.
vids and guides and stuff
[9:52] [Zone #11] Neal@trapper1532: im a omega force shadow oprative and a maoc elite camander and here i am taking water samples
PaxOttomana: gawd mirror event is like fighting a tsi premade, they keep comin and comin!
Huh? Somebody call me?
But yeah, it's probably time to look at the state of things when what used to be counters are now maintained as a baseline. There is no longer an E in EPTS. I remember back in the day Cryptic said they had to choose between everybody being a captain and everybody starting as an ensign pushing buttons in main engineering. Well, we're kind of there. I actually do spend time just pushing buttons to cycle EPTx.
Er. Muh. Gerd. This hurts so badly to watch because I want STO to be awesome. It just makes me flash back to things like the temporal time out. I ranted that any time a player is put in a situation without a counter, a situation where removing their hands from the keyboard will have the same effect as leaving them there, that it was inherently bad for the game. And then there's the part in the vid about testing it rigorously. We were assured that nothing could hurt you in the temporal field so it wasn't really a stun, but then we got temporal tric'ing. It hurts, it really does, to see the advice is "Use your brain, think it through, and test it."
Watching that vid on balanced game design was like listening to great advice from a psychologist on how to build healthy relationships while thinking that I can't wait to get back to my girlfriend so she can empty my bank account and step on my balls some more.
CommanderDonatra@Capt.Sisko: ahhh is it supposed to do that?
Norvo Tigan@dontdrunkimshoot: hell ya, maybe
But the point is still well stated. It somehwat lacks these days in STO.
PaxOttomana: gawd mirror event is like fighting a tsi premade, they keep comin and comin!
Setting caps on buffs/debuffs would allow balancing without needing to touch (almost) anything. For example, if weapon damage could only be buffed by X%, you would be able to choose how to get there thru some mixture of tac consoles, buffs, etc. Hell, Cryptic could make it possible for any type of captain to reach any of the caps.
And diversity of builds increases - if you only need 3 tac consoles to hit the cap on energy weapons, you could finally dust off those torpedo consoles.
And special consoles just get you to a given cap faster, or with a different console slot. So a "slow" special console might impose the maximum "slow" debuff without using a BO slot for a tractor beam.
[Kluless][Kold][Steel Heels][Snagtooth]
[Louis Cipher][Outta Gum][Thysa Kymbo][Spanner][Frakk]
[D'Mented][D'Licious]
Joined October 2009. READ BEFORE POSTING
Also, audio cues often give a heads up of an incoming alphas. BOs have a longer activation time and the audio cue starts at the beginning of the activation. Torps have a travel time and the audio cue helps.
I don't prebuff my teams and run 2-3 team types on nearly all my builds. I'll often only run w/1 copy of TT including non-aux2batt builds. I'm able to do this by piloting, having other Boff counters, and listening.
This doesn't mean my ship doesn't explode, it happens but (lag spikes aside) it's b/c the otherside played better, I was attempting to buy time for allies and sac'd myself, or I got tunnel vision and wasn't paying attention to what else was going on around me (usually the cause of my death b/c I prefer a hit and run playstyle and get stubborn and don't run when I should).
Random Quote from Kerrat
"Sumlobus@****: your mums eat Iced Targ Poo"
C&H Fed banter
This game of all the mmos I have played has some of the shortest cool downs one everything.
Even powerful captain abilities have no more then 3 min cool downs. Pretty much every other mmo ever made has much slower buff cycles.
I think it is part of the magic that keeps us coming back here despite all the other issues we complain about. STO is fast paced. (or at least it used to be) Don't get me wrong I never felt like it was some space shooter... it still felt very trek to me. (I know some people claimed the speed was untrek)... I think it had a nice balance. If you made an error with a buff there was ways to correct things before it was to late... ect.
Now we have a game where the devs seem to have decided that the very fast buff system we had wasn't fast enough. How else do you explain every second item/doff release having some sort of cool down reduction.
It has gotten to a point where there is no more point counter point... because frankly everything is always on. Having most buffs cooled down to global is pretty much a reality these days... you can get there with Tech doffs, dmg control doffs, all the weapons doffs, time sets, lockbox ships with more boff slots, fleet deflectors, all the sci skill doffs, Attack Pattern doffs.
Of all the changes the devs have made in the last year or so... its the cool down changes that have had the most impact imo... mostly it has completely removed the point counter point system... the heal reductions have made well built sci ships darn near unkillable... it has made escorts extremely tanky by freeing up tac slots, while increasing uptimes on high level attack patterns, and Emergency power systems. (lets all be honest with ourselves now... my escort has EPTS 1 and EPTE 1 up 100% of the time... and omega 3 up 50% of the time, delta is up when omega isn't and I run a aux to damp just in case I really need some turn.... there is no looking for the gaps in my buffs anymore cause there isn't one).
In any event I don't mean to turn this into a 2 page rant. I have found PvP to be less and less enjoyable in STO the last year... at first I blamed that on p2w consoles, and even ships. The more I think about it however, I think it really comes down to the dumbing down of the PvP game. The need for timing has been reduces... the value in watching buff bars has been lessened. (yes its still important... but there is no more counting off your enemies buff bars... cause likely when it ends it will just be reapplied)
With out annoying alot of people by completely changing a ton of doffs, items, and even ships... I can't think of anyway to bring that back. I honestly fear these types of threads are pretty much a post mortum at his point. It might be time for Cryptic to take note of where they let it go off the rails so they don't make the same mistake with there future titles.
The problem now is not any single special doff, console or whatever, it's that they all add together with no limit.
[Kluless][Kold][Steel Heels][Snagtooth]
[Louis Cipher][Outta Gum][Thysa Kymbo][Spanner][Frakk]
[D'Mented][D'Licious]
Joined October 2009. READ BEFORE POSTING
What's wrong with the game is a cumulative effect of so many, so so so many, so many things. They keep lumping more and more on - without considering how those pieces may or may not work together. They delude themselves into believing that they're offering an opportunity cost - but that cost's not there. Things aren't anywhere near balanced enough for there to be an opportunity cost in most cases.
And more's going to be added.
At what point do they just make all buffs active and give everybody SNB DOFFs - so with a mix of lucky RNG from a few sources, folks might get the kill? How much of the game already revolves around VM, SNB, and other various lucky procs because as was stated earlier in the thread - folks are running around near perma buffed - where they still have stuff in reserve for the gaps...or maybe they even have some RNG defensive proc.
It's almost enough to make somebody PvE...
www.divisionhispana.com
Spaceships without potential issues one might face in other Yay Spaceships games.
Yep, Cryptic knows they've got folks by the short and curlies...