I liked the daily Dyson Commendations. It made leveling that rep quick and simple. Nearly done now with it thankfully. Glad that they are revamping the rep systems, though I personally hate them but my obsessive compulsive desire to complete everything forces me to trudge on albeit reluctantly. :rolleyes:
"The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." - Rocky Balboa (2006)
I have basically infinite expertise on every single one of my characters. I don't even think- about the expertise bar once my character has been 50 for like, a week. what game are you -PLAYING-?
Yeah, I dump my xp into the Starbase and other projects as quickly as possible and I have millions of XP.
To devs, please add these marks permanently to Foundry. Integrate the systems.
It's probably a problem if you are running a starbase with 4 holdings as a side project.
Eh, I suppose, but honestly, the stuff you have to do to get the dil and fleet marks brings expertise with it, and in my experience, fleet marks and dilithium are by far the choke point on that.
It's likely you don't belong to a small fleet. Try being one of only two or three active contributors when it comes to Fleet projects that need millions of XP. :P
Yeah, sorry, this is already me. but as I said, the things I do to get marks and dil also fill me up on XP. Maybe that curve will change when our fleet gets higher, but right now, XP is really not hard to come by.
Eh, I suppose, but honestly, the stuff you have to do to get the dil and fleet marks brings expertise with it, and in my experience, fleet marks and dilithium are by far the choke point on that.
Fleet marks are the easiest thing to get, I find. I can fill fleet mark requirements faster than anything else. Dilithium is for sure the slowest thing in a small fleet because of the 8K limit per toon a day.
Join date is wrong, I've actually been around since STO Beta.
True alters don't have a "main". Account wide unlocks for all unique event rewards!!
Nice blog, very welcome changes. Great stuff to read. Especially with the boosts of the romulan/reman and nukara space sets.
We will have to see how much help the daily bonuses are, since now without the calendar hourly events its gonna be harder to stock pile marks wich to be used in busy days to advance in the reputation.
On the costume unlocks, any chance to make the unlocks for the bridge officers too? I cant understand why the rep gear costumes are forbitten to be used on boffs, since all the other costumes work on them
Sounds pretty good! No more commodities! Seriously, those were easily the worst part of the old reputation system. Shame this isn't going to go live until season 9, I'd love it for my alts right now.
To be honest I'm not a real fan of the hourly projects. I'd rather have two dailies, it's more convinent, I can "set and forget" my reputations on days I'm busy. With hourly, I feel compelled to leave the game run in the background, which is a distraction (I can't count the number of times I've gone in the do DOFFs and suddenly it's two hours later ).
Also, the removal of Mk X and XI items is a bit of a disappointment. If I did decide to pick rep gear up for my alts, I was definitely going to take an economical route with them. I realize the majority of players probably just view the lower mark stuff as a waste, and I did at first too, but you really don't need it for most of this game's content.
Okay, here's a twisted concern...and yes, I'm posting this from a heavily guarded and fortified location because I know it will not be popular in the least.
Will there be enough to do? Will there be a reason to play?
As much as folks tend to complain about the grinds, what do we have to do other than them?
Picture somebody that's T5 across the board, in a T5 fleet, have DOFF'd out the wahzoo, and well - what do they have to do?
All those grinds...have been a reason to continue logging into the game. With the endgame basically being about grind, with reduced grind/easier grinding - what will be the point of endgame?
Yes, there are players that complain about needing to have everything by a week ago last Thursday - but what do they think they're going to do once everything is done?
Does STO just become a 3D chatroom for lonely folks? Move over Match.com and eHarmony - it's STO, finding love in 2409?
So are there any plans in the works for improvements to PvP or the Foundry...which would be part of a robust endgame where participating in them are rewards in of themselves...unlike the general endgame in STO which is basically gathering rewards for various grinds - that - well, you've been working on reducing?
"Hey, I'm going to log into STO so I can..." that pause "...hrmm, just why am I going to log in again?"
Unless content production is being ramped up...there are going to be some major dry spells unless folks actually have something to do...
I get the massive focus on the new player, but once again - like so many other things - this comes off as ignoring the "not-new player"...
...so maybe some PvP and Foundry love down the road? Just a thought.
Im a foundry author and I can say that right now, its still very good. Yes, we all want improvements like crazy, but as is, the Foundry is still an amazing tool and many amazing stories have come out of it. To quote one of the hosts of the Foundry Roundtable (I think it's Drogyn, but its been a while since that episode now), "The Foundry is STO's retirement plan." And while, yes, it needs the updated assets, you guys can totally have fun in it right now.
So please, anyone who hits maxed out everything: please check out the Foundry.
Yeah, sorry, this is already me. but as I said, the things I do to get marks and dil also fill me up on XP. Maybe that curve will change when our fleet gets higher, but right now, XP is really not hard to come by.
I don't disagree that XP is easy to come by. But if you're running a fleet all on your own and you're higher than tier 3, plus you're multi tooning to get rep systems done and gather dil. XP doesn't flow in as fast as if you were just playing one toon and contributing 1/50th of a project amount for example. Not to mention if you change ships often and possibly retrain Boffs to try new builds, that all requires XP. So I agree with the point made that really we already have enough XP requirements to not need them on the daily Rep projects too.
Join date is wrong, I've actually been around since STO Beta.
True alters don't have a "main". Account wide unlocks for all unique event rewards!!
I don't care for the hourly projects at all. when I make an alt toon I lvl all 4 reps at same time. 3 would complete on same day and dyson took 2 weeks longer. I guess if you do not have many toons, or you like grinding a grind its ok but its not for me.
and then they say a handful of times is all you can do for the rep then it turns to dil rewards.
Trophies for killing FEDS ahh those were the days.
The big problem is the Expertise cost. If the 2500 XP project only needed marks, this would not be trouble.
I second this being a problem. In the pre-fleets holdings and reputation world, everyone had plenty of XP, and those old toons still do, but for newer toons, it's hard to come by the XP to fill projects with so many things sucking XP and no daily Mirror bonus XP event to prop the XP back up.
I am curious about the costume unlocks for the Mk X and Mk XI Omega, Maco, and Honor Guard sets and their associated unlocks. Will it now just be rolled into when you complete the Mk XII?
Now that you mention it - I wouldn't be surprised if those reputation item packs will also contain kit modules - would totally make sense and be a great way to give people access to more of them.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Not a bad idea.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
What about the accolades tied into the mk x and xi borg sets?
We're investigating solutions for existing players with half-completed Accolades in this area. Possibly auto-completing them if you only have one piece of the set, or something like that. We don't want a player that has invested into the system to lose anything they've worked toward, but we're not completely certain on how to address it just yet.
For newer players, these Accolades will likely become un-discoverable, no longer appearing in their Journal, and no longer being something they can even begin, much less complete.
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
I don't think the MK XI items should be removed. They cost less dil and the difference is small between the DPS of say a MK XI Rommy Plasma and the same MK XII type. Though I suppose the extra grind needed is xactly what they want.
Would there be any chance to get a set upgrade project, like nukara ones where you trade in your old tholian gear for the new sets. This would be great for us upgrading our old XI and X space/ground sets to XII. I know I've got a few X and XI pieces that would become redundant otherwise.
Agreed with this. A rep project that costs some resources and allows you to upgrade your X or XI gear would be great.
2, You mention the hourly rep projects can now only be run a 'handful' (an actual number instead of 'handful' would be helpful here) of times each day. Why? All I can see in that is an attempt to slow progression of the rep system. I mean, if I earn several hundred marks in a day, shouldn't I be able to advance faster than somebody who earns the bare minimum?
If they don't change it from the way it is on Tribble, it's 3 times per day.
What about the accolades tied into the mk x and xi borg sets?
This is going to completely break the entire Omega accolade system.
Yes what about this? The accolades, and the costume unlocks that are tied to the lower-than-XII omega-rep sets? Will their flags all be updated to unlock once the player gets just an XII set?
I don't disagree that XP is easy to come by. But if you're running a fleet all on your own and you're higher than tier 3, plus you're multi tooning to get rep systems done and gather dil. XP doesn't flow in as fast as if you were just playing one toon and contributing 1/50th of a project amount for example. Not to mention if you change ships often and possibly retrain Boffs to try new builds, that all requires XP. So I agree with the point made that really we already have enough XP requirements to not need them on the daily Rep projects too.
Define "all on your own." Are you saying you're soloing a fleet? It was never designed for 1 player to do it. It requires a group effort to amass the resources, including xp.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
awesome sauce though i do hope to have my reps mostly finished by the new season to make time for any *ahem* new reputation
handy for the future though.
"If this will be our end, then I will have them make SUCH an end as to be worthy of rememberance! Out of torpedos you say?! Find me the ferengi!".
I have no problem with the costs of anything, but I would adore some additions to the UI that can reduce clicking necessary to get these projects started.
I LOVED the commendation, because starting the main reputation project was so respectively simple.
Select the reputation.
Click Select Active Project.
Find Main Project.
Click Select.
Click the Active Project you just activated.
Click the Contribute button for providing commendation.
Click the slider control anywhere in the upper 50% (as only 1 commendation is required).
Click OK. Project started!
Even so, this is a lot of clicking for something that has to be done everyday, and it's far from the only reputation project.
In the new system as described, mirroring the "lesser" project from the Dyson reputation for both major and lesser projects for all, this is the sequence every day for every reputation you're working on leveling.:
Select the reputation.
Click First Select Active Project
Find the main project.
Click Select.
Click the Active Project you just activated.
Click the Contribute button for the marks.
Drag the slider to the right, all the way, don't be off by a few pixels or more sliding will be required.
Click OK.
Click the Contribute button for expertise.
Drag the slider to the right, all the way, don't be off by a single pixel or more sliding will be required.
Click OK.
Click the Contribute button for the the energy credits.
Drag the slider to the right, all the way, don't be off by a single pixel or more sliding will be required.
Click OK.
Click Second Select Active Project
Find the lesser project.
Click Select.
Click the Active Project you just activated.
Click the Contribute button for the marks.
Drag the slider to the right, all the way, don't be off by a few pixels or more sliding will be required.
Click OK.
Click the Contribute button for expertise.
Drag the slider to the right, all the way, don't be off by a single pixel or more sliding will be required.
Click OK.
Click the Contribute button for the the energy credits.
Drag the slider to the right, all the way, don't be off by a single pixel or more sliding will be required.
Click OK.
The long and short of it is, it's at least 30 clicks per reputation every day devoted to a task that requires nothing more than a "Fast Start" button above the project's submit button that draws the required elements from your inventory and assets and gets the project going. There are no keyboard shortcuts, tabbing to the quantity entry field for the submission is not available. There's no way to get the reputation going for the day without a ton of repetitive clicking.
If required elements are missing, either the Fast Start button is not available (indicating what is missing via tooltip) or it adds as much as it can and takes you to the project in progress to display what's missing.
But please, for the sake of my wrists, discover a way for the reputations to demand less repetitive clicking. It's not fun. It's confusing to new players (source: me trying to explain how to do it to my wife last night) and it could be made better.
Commendations did serve a purpose and were planning on introducing Daily Bonus Marks to replace them
Is this an admission that there was a Marks nerf then with the removal of the Daily Bonus Marks hour ?
The 'weekends only' thing didn't work as much as you hoped ?
Damn, I'm just starting to do the Reps for my new Romulan toon, he will be finished, when those changes hit the Holodeck.
Overall though the changes sound pretty good. The Mk X and XI gear was just a waste, the different items you had to buy for the projects were only annoying. So, it will remain somewhat of a grind, but it will make more sense.
BTW: Will there be a new Rep faction with Season 9?
Ultimately, after a bit of data-mining, listening to player feedback, and experiencing the flow of the Dyson Joint Command first hand, weve decided to ditch Commendations entirely and keep things nice and simple.
weve decided to ditch Commendations entirely and keep things nice and simple.
keep things nice and simple.
This has D'Angelo's fingerprints all over it.
As for the rest of the changes; it looks like a mixed bag.
Sticking with the improvements made with Dyson reputation is a great move - the removal of Store Unlocks, low costs for Tier upgrades, swapping commodities for straight up EC, reward packs, etc. All good moves back then and it's good to see they'll be applied to the existing Reps as well as any future ones. The adjustments to costume unlocks and keeping sponsorship are also good.
My only annoyance with the loss of Commendations to these "Bonus Marks" dailies is that the big projects obviously still require expertise to complete, and - as i've said until i'm blue in the face - the changes made to Mirror Universe mean that Expertise is hard to come by in large quantities whilst playing at endgame level. The new MU queue is good, but it's limited time means it's not much use in April when S9 launches.
So unless the revamped MU queue will become a permanent fixture when S9 launches, i'm afraid I won't be able to complete the new Undine Rep because - yet again - I won't have enough Expertise.
You're just a machine. And machines can be broken.
I am curious about the costume unlocks for the Mk X and Mk XI Omega, Maco, and Honor Guard sets and their associated unlocks. Will it now just be rolled into when you complete the Mk XII?
Mk X/XI costume unlocks for Task Force Omega sets have always been redundant with Mk XII. If you had the Mk XII set, the only reasons to buy the lower grades were to get the accolades and to outfit your Boffs for less.
Does this mean that the costumes that have been bugged since the implementation of the reputation system for previous players is getting fixed? Would love to be able to finally get the accolade version of the omega force costume.
An elite STF gives you around a thousand Expertise if you are lucky.
One Mark XII set item needs 64 THOUSAND Expertise. 64000. That's 64 elite STFS for ONE set item.
Now, with the old MU, you could grind up to 30k Expertise if you really grinded it for an hour with a good level 50 character. That's two hours for the exp cost for 1 set item.
Now.... where will I get the Expertise for these sets? New Mu is way too slow and cooldowned.
Let us wear Swimsuits on Foundry maps or bridges please! I would pay zen for that.
Comments
Yeah, I dump my xp into the Starbase and other projects as quickly as possible and I have millions of XP.
To devs, please add these marks permanently to Foundry. Integrate the systems.
Eh, I suppose, but honestly, the stuff you have to do to get the dil and fleet marks brings expertise with it, and in my experience, fleet marks and dilithium are by far the choke point on that.
Yeah, sorry, this is already me. but as I said, the things I do to get marks and dil also fill me up on XP. Maybe that curve will change when our fleet gets higher, but right now, XP is really not hard to come by.
Fleet marks are the easiest thing to get, I find. I can fill fleet mark requirements faster than anything else. Dilithium is for sure the slowest thing in a small fleet because of the 8K limit per toon a day.
We will have to see how much help the daily bonuses are, since now without the calendar hourly events its gonna be harder to stock pile marks wich to be used in busy days to advance in the reputation.
On the costume unlocks, any chance to make the unlocks for the bridge officers too? I cant understand why the rep gear costumes are forbitten to be used on boffs, since all the other costumes work on them
To be honest I'm not a real fan of the hourly projects. I'd rather have two dailies, it's more convinent, I can "set and forget" my reputations on days I'm busy. With hourly, I feel compelled to leave the game run in the background, which is a distraction (I can't count the number of times I've gone in the do DOFFs and suddenly it's two hours later
Also, the removal of Mk X and XI items is a bit of a disappointment. If I did decide to pick rep gear up for my alts, I was definitely going to take an economical route with them. I realize the majority of players probably just view the lower mark stuff as a waste, and I did at first too, but you really don't need it for most of this game's content.
Im a foundry author and I can say that right now, its still very good. Yes, we all want improvements like crazy, but as is, the Foundry is still an amazing tool and many amazing stories have come out of it. To quote one of the hosts of the Foundry Roundtable (I think it's Drogyn, but its been a while since that episode now), "The Foundry is STO's retirement plan." And while, yes, it needs the updated assets, you guys can totally have fun in it right now.
So please, anyone who hits maxed out everything: please check out the Foundry.
TRIBBLE Hydra! Hail Janeway!
I don't disagree that XP is easy to come by. But if you're running a fleet all on your own and you're higher than tier 3, plus you're multi tooning to get rep systems done and gather dil. XP doesn't flow in as fast as if you were just playing one toon and contributing 1/50th of a project amount for example. Not to mention if you change ships often and possibly retrain Boffs to try new builds, that all requires XP. So I agree with the point made that really we already have enough XP requirements to not need them on the daily Rep projects too.
This is going to completely break the entire Omega accolade system.
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
and then they say a handful of times is all you can do for the rep then it turns to dil rewards.
I second this being a problem. In the pre-fleets holdings and reputation world, everyone had plenty of XP, and those old toons still do, but for newer toons, it's hard to come by the XP to fill projects with so many things sucking XP and no daily Mirror bonus XP event to prop the XP back up.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
also means no more cheaper mk 10 version for away team BOFFs to use.
Really happy with all the changes.
I'm only coming up to tier 3 on my starbase, so I guess I haven't encountered this problem.
But I've seen people complaining about having too much exp even after they've hit tier 4 starbases.
Not a bad idea.
your joking right? they put a 1 hour project grind to the already rep grind. so your now grinding a grind.
We're investigating solutions for existing players with half-completed Accolades in this area. Possibly auto-completing them if you only have one piece of the set, or something like that. We don't want a player that has invested into the system to lose anything they've worked toward, but we're not completely certain on how to address it just yet.
For newer players, these Accolades will likely become un-discoverable, no longer appearing in their Journal, and no longer being something they can even begin, much less complete.
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
Agreed with this. A rep project that costs some resources and allows you to upgrade your X or XI gear would be great.
If they don't change it from the way it is on Tribble, it's 3 times per day.
Yes what about this? The accolades, and the costume unlocks that are tied to the lower-than-XII omega-rep sets? Will their flags all be updated to unlock once the player gets just an XII set?
Define "all on your own." Are you saying you're soloing a fleet? It was never designed for 1 player to do it. It requires a group effort to amass the resources, including xp.
Joined January 2009
handy for the future though.
"If this will be our end, then I will have them make SUCH an end as to be worthy of rememberance! Out of torpedos you say?! Find me the ferengi!".
I LOVED the commendation, because starting the main reputation project was so respectively simple.
Even so, this is a lot of clicking for something that has to be done everyday, and it's far from the only reputation project.
In the new system as described, mirroring the "lesser" project from the Dyson reputation for both major and lesser projects for all, this is the sequence every day for every reputation you're working on leveling.:
The long and short of it is, it's at least 30 clicks per reputation every day devoted to a task that requires nothing more than a "Fast Start" button above the project's submit button that draws the required elements from your inventory and assets and gets the project going. There are no keyboard shortcuts, tabbing to the quantity entry field for the submission is not available. There's no way to get the reputation going for the day without a ton of repetitive clicking.
If required elements are missing, either the Fast Start button is not available (indicating what is missing via tooltip) or it adds as much as it can and takes you to the project in progress to display what's missing.
But please, for the sake of my wrists, discover a way for the reputations to demand less repetitive clicking. It's not fun. It's confusing to new players (source: me trying to explain how to do it to my wife last night) and it could be made better.
Is this an admission that there was a Marks nerf then with the removal of the Daily Bonus Marks hour ?
The 'weekends only' thing didn't work as much as you hoped ?
Overall though the changes sound pretty good. The Mk X and XI gear was just a waste, the different items you had to buy for the projects were only annoying. So, it will remain somewhat of a grind, but it will make more sense.
BTW: Will there be a new Rep faction with Season 9?
This has D'Angelo's fingerprints all over it.
As for the rest of the changes; it looks like a mixed bag.
Sticking with the improvements made with Dyson reputation is a great move - the removal of Store Unlocks, low costs for Tier upgrades, swapping commodities for straight up EC, reward packs, etc. All good moves back then and it's good to see they'll be applied to the existing Reps as well as any future ones. The adjustments to costume unlocks and keeping sponsorship are also good.
My only annoyance with the loss of Commendations to these "Bonus Marks" dailies is that the big projects obviously still require expertise to complete, and - as i've said until i'm blue in the face - the changes made to Mirror Universe mean that Expertise is hard to come by in large quantities whilst playing at endgame level. The new MU queue is good, but it's limited time means it's not much use in April when S9 launches.
So unless the revamped MU queue will become a permanent fixture when S9 launches, i'm afraid I won't be able to complete the new Undine Rep because - yet again - I won't have enough Expertise.
Mk X/XI costume unlocks for Task Force Omega sets have always been redundant with Mk XII. If you had the Mk XII set, the only reasons to buy the lower grades were to get the accolades and to outfit your Boffs for less.
One Mark XII set item needs 64 THOUSAND Expertise. 64000. That's 64 elite STFS for ONE set item.
Now, with the old MU, you could grind up to 30k Expertise if you really grinded it for an hour with a good level 50 character. That's two hours for the exp cost for 1 set item.
Now.... where will I get the Expertise for these sets? New Mu is way too slow and cooldowned.