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Why so much GRINDING? Is there an end to it?
crusader2007
Member Posts: 1,883 Arc User
Is there another business model besides grinding to death players at STO?
I'd say instead of evolving this game into a great way to unwind your day after a hard laborious day...all you have to look for is more grinding which at times feel like a second job.
Not speaking for anyone but myself but STO is becoming a grinding orgy full of repetitive tasks and objectives. I know that nobody is putting a gun to make people stay here but just stating this is not the "only way to make a fast buck". Lots of dear friends come and go due to the complete and utterly boring experience that grinding has become....not that they care since for the ones leaving others would come till they get tired then the cycle repeats itself.
Not complaining either just stating a FACT of the game and would be prudent to please seek for another model that enhances player retention and still make a fast buck for Cryptic. Perhaps the C store is unprofitable but Aren't the boxes good enough or the sale of packages like LoR? Why the masochistic attitude to punish players with some sort of formula that people need to invest certain time to equalize a benefit...say better gear or upgrades. What happened to the random drops? Used to be great in prior seasons and at least kept people HOPING for better gear. Nowadays its just an incessant hopeless and boring experience.
Omega marks, Romulan Marks, Nukara, All fleet projects (mine, Dil and SB) and even the fun ones (seasonal events - yeah if you want to have "real" fun...please grind some more).
To top it all continues through season 8 with the Spires projects as well the Dyson Adventure zone. What is so fun in adventure zone if you are grinding B to get to A?
I guess the better name for S8 would be "to grind where nobody has dare to grind before". What happened to the gazillions of fixes or even upgrading the same old PvP maps we are using since launched?
Grinding is NOT fun please make drops RANDOM or come up with a better alternative. I'm sure lots will disagree but to each its own...just stating the problem that there has to be a better way that's all.
I'd say instead of evolving this game into a great way to unwind your day after a hard laborious day...all you have to look for is more grinding which at times feel like a second job.
Not speaking for anyone but myself but STO is becoming a grinding orgy full of repetitive tasks and objectives. I know that nobody is putting a gun to make people stay here but just stating this is not the "only way to make a fast buck". Lots of dear friends come and go due to the complete and utterly boring experience that grinding has become....not that they care since for the ones leaving others would come till they get tired then the cycle repeats itself.
Not complaining either just stating a FACT of the game and would be prudent to please seek for another model that enhances player retention and still make a fast buck for Cryptic. Perhaps the C store is unprofitable but Aren't the boxes good enough or the sale of packages like LoR? Why the masochistic attitude to punish players with some sort of formula that people need to invest certain time to equalize a benefit...say better gear or upgrades. What happened to the random drops? Used to be great in prior seasons and at least kept people HOPING for better gear. Nowadays its just an incessant hopeless and boring experience.
Omega marks, Romulan Marks, Nukara, All fleet projects (mine, Dil and SB) and even the fun ones (seasonal events - yeah if you want to have "real" fun...please grind some more).
To top it all continues through season 8 with the Spires projects as well the Dyson Adventure zone. What is so fun in adventure zone if you are grinding B to get to A?
I guess the better name for S8 would be "to grind where nobody has dare to grind before". What happened to the gazillions of fixes or even upgrading the same old PvP maps we are using since launched?
Grinding is NOT fun please make drops RANDOM or come up with a better alternative. I'm sure lots will disagree but to each its own...just stating the problem that there has to be a better way that's all.
Post edited by crusader2007 on
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Let me tell ya, when I finished the personal rep grind, and the base projects are all set... I have trouble deciding what to do... I was less likely to "want" to sign in. Whereas the grind of ... "Oh God, I need 24K Dilithium, and 70 Rom marks"... actually NAGS at me.
Believe it or not... there is actual psychology behind these things... It acts almost like an addiction.
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....
Pro Slider since 2409
Officially Nerfed In Early 2410
I hear some F2P game companies have hire psychologists to advise on how to make their games more addictive, and to discover how get people to spend more money.
But it also tends to have the opposite affect. I mean, who really wants grind the same rep when you've already done it on two or three other toons. Even if doing all of your rep lines on a single toon, it gets old fast
There is nothing too much wrong with a rep grind. The problem is that in the game this Rep grinds are used in substitute for actual content. A new planet and system is nice, but then you have to grind the same two or three missions to get those marks that are rewarded in poor quantity, and anything that awards a decent amount of marks is locked behind a days worth of time gates.
Star Trek: The Original Grind
Star Trek: The Next Grind
Star Trek: Deep Space Grind
Star Trek: Voyage to the Grind
It is frustrating but fact
My PvE/PvP hybrid skill tree
Course if you're not going to grind, you might as well quit, because that's the only end game we have, the grind. There is zero endgame outside the grind and it's practically all the same, just with different skins.
And what's worse is, if you're one of those people that just have to have the newest latest shiney, they've gotten it timed so they knows exactly when the majority of the players are running out of the grind. At that exact moment they'll drag in another grind for you to do, and another, and another. Season 8 is nothing but additional grind. No seriously, it's looks pretty, but really it's just another grind with a pretty skin.
There is PvP of course, but the catch 22 is you still need to go through the same grind to even have a chance to compete.
So you go back to PvE and grind out the latest shiney to more efficiently...
Oh wait...
I've now got tier 5 rep in all 3 categories. The grind I do now is mostly to help my fleet level up.
every f2p game has this model type.. they add grinding, then a way to pay to bypass it.
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
Especially Fleet Marks, since you can't have a fleet that doesn't progress these days since you can't get anything good without Fleet Credits and Dilithium. I'm almost at my limit with STO, I want to enjoy the game, not Work the blasted game where I don't even get any rewards for my trouble. :mad:
I thought the locked boxes and the new ships (packages) were how they make money?
Grinding is not profit making for Cryptic but just keeping people busy to get some shiny upgrades or the like. Grinding DOES NOT equal profit but discourages player retention which has the opposite effect.
If you remove the various grinds you remove most of the Silver players playing, who are grinding Dilithium in order to trade it for Zen to buy things.
^This.
how I would phrase it though is yes they make profit off of lockbox and c-store items, that profit is what they're using to make our seasons and the next lockbox and c-store items.
The Exchange is what pays the day to day bills
WoTMUD
Nodeka
UO
SB
CoP
Darkfall Online
WoW
Rift
GW1 & 2
Allods Online
DotD
Wartune
TERA
The worst of them all was, is, and likely always will be WoW - especially Molten Front in Cataclysm, which was an absolute ball-ache.
STO's grind isn't much when compared to a number of the games listed above, let alone the hardcore Asian-developed grinders that are out there.
Sure, it would be nice to see some proper fleet content similar in structure to the raids you see in other games.... but that more or less requires the revitalization of the holy trinity, given the generally lackluster outcome of non-trinity group/multi-group content developed in some other MMOs - GW2 being a notable example with its dungeon and even bosses that often ended up being corpse-run kite-fests. I'm not really sure how re-creating the holy trinity would be worked out, let alone what sort of reception it would get from the general playerbase, given the length of time most of us have had to get used to neither expecting nor really requiring any form of cross-healing. I'm sure some would welcome it because it goes hand-in-hand with conceptually more challenging content, but plenty of others don't want that style of gameplay, and furthermore don't want to end up being pigeon-holed by their chosen class (nor be abused by idiots for being in a DPS-oriented ship as a Sci/Eng, for example).
Even with raid style content though, people would likely end up complaining about the factors involved in creating and maintaining a regular raid group, there'd be arguments about lockouts, about loot RNG - you name it people would find a reason to ***** about it - and I've seen plenty of guilds break apart because of ongoing tension over raiding.
I suppose that puts me in the middle ground, since I don't think the grind's particularly bad, but I do want to see more to endgame content than reputation/fleet cred/dil grinding.
Nice bird's eye perspective of what else is out there in the real world. I wouldn't mind if they can create a "raid style content" rather than grinding or experiment with both at the same time...there has to be a "balance" to this insanity of just grinding day in/out.
Atari was quite good at this back in the early 1980s. I refuse to even try to estimate how many quarters I spent on Atari arcade games. And then, when I was in my first year of college in 1987-88, they had about four or five arcade games in the lunch room. There went more of my quarters. Get people to spend more money on games? Yeesh. Isn't America bankrupt enough as it is (except for the rich folks, that is)?
I like this post a lot. I do exactly the same when I dont want to grind I kinda came into this game to do Star Trek missions not grind. But for some reason I like grinding some, when im doing it with friends, it can be a lot of fun, me and 2 of my fleet mates went at it for hours and had a blast. The minute I get frustrated or bored when grinding I do either foundry, talk to fleet peeps, or just log off for rest of day. I mean were complaining about grinding despite the fact there's a ton of trek missions in the foundry(if you search through a ton of TRIBBLE grind missions). I mean if your looking for true trek missions and some fun seriously look in the foundry. The only reason your grinding is because YOU WANT TO. You care a lot about getting that new shiny gear or upgrading the fleet starbase. But going into a video game is to have fun, not to stress over rep systems and fleet holdings, its to have FUN. If your not having fun thats a sign you need a break or you need to quit the game, because I have a lot of fun playing this game thats why I stay. Thats just my 2 cents.
Why quit, if your not gonna grind just go silver(free by the way), and do foundry missions(free to by the way) or role play(may i say free again?)
So no, lot more to do than grinding.
A Borg STF, with optional can be finish with out any problem with a free ship with MK X common stuff. The rest of the PVE queue maps are just a joke.
PVP is completely forgotten by the devs.
So again.. I have my 3000 zen ships, with all the Ultra Hiper Rare Items of the rep system and base.. to do what? Finish ISE in 2 minutes instead of 3 or 4?
Division Hispana
www.divisionhispana.com
In the days before the Internet, when you finished a game you stopped playing it.
You have an additional choice here with an MMORPG - once you are done with the story content you can grind.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
Grinding is substitute for an immersive universe of exploration and adventure. They can add more grind easily.
Correct. Not only that, but this game is very heavy on time gated content.
The time gating is the mask Cryptic tries to put over for the lack of actual things to do at endgame.
I.e., Starbase System. Not only is it a massive grind, but it is massively expensive. Even more so for small fleets, which this system is designed to kick squarely in the nuts.
No, it's beyond kicked in the groin for small fleets. Either people from these fleets quit STO altogether or caved an joined the Zerg (Large Fleets).
/sigh Yep, welcome to Star Trek Online. Boldly go.......nowhere.
Oh yeah, grind is a choice. Unfortunately, there is nothing in that isn't a grind or doesn't require you to grind.
so you be endless grinding what i hate btw to get ore hope
good stuff
in the mean time most companies sell items in cash shop to up the %
for drop rating btw what not rely works but you spend alot of real cash
this is how things are in the mmorpg world