making it so you couldn't use just invited afk'ers, and I think 80 percent of the time I had some form of afk player in the match.. and yes, it was far far too long.. missions should leave you wishing they were over, if it had been a ten minute mission, it would have been perfect. but to fly around and literally close rifts and zerg enemies, it was far far too long..
it was also lacking any form of story, there was no who what where why when or how. and while voiceovers were decent (sick of obisek lol) the writing of what those voiceovers said was sub par.. and he would say the same things over and over and over and over and over again..
I didn't see many AFK'ers. But I did see folks who didn't bother with stopping the ships coming out of the rifts or closing the rifts, instead they flew from one gen to the other to power up the station. This may have been what some of you encountered rather than actual afk'ers. The Station could be dropped to 0 health go off line then reboot without ending the mission. Of course you didnt get much of a bonus for Station health but I don't think those folks cared and it wasn't much of a penalty. This happened on about 98% of the ones I queued up for. On almost every mission I was in the middle of swarms of mirror ships, swarms being they covered the map. Luckily I was using my KDF toons for the event and anything foolish enough to get in range of my weapons was space garbage.
Some penalty other than just losing a few marks should've been implimented for letting the station drop to 0 health. And as the others before me stated some more could've been done to polish it up.
1) You couldn't really win. Too many ships kept spawning; and the relationship between rifts opening and ships appearing was somewhat lost after the patch (which made you realize you should just forget about closing those rifts, and blast everything around you).
I was on some elite runs where every rift was closed ASAP and at the end, there were zero MU starships present on the board when the MU Dreadnaught spawned. It was rather amusing seeing the cutscene clearing the board of non-existing MU starships. Our final marks reward was around 84 for those runs.
hits:
teamwork required for decent performance unless all uber players
awesome rewards (marks and dil!)
elite mode at least somewhat challenging esp with pug teams
misses:
ship type bonuses should have been captain type. Esp since many ships that should close or power faster cannot (rom ships ... carriers ... etc)
station enemy shove made struggling groups have an even worse time of it
interruptible actions made it harder for weak teams. Basically the worse the team the harder everything became at an increasing rate, while the better teams faced fewer enemy and had an easier go. So it scaled the wrong way for good/bad groups, really. ]
broken boss is coming cutscene out of body immersion breaking mess.
afk/stay dead/do nothing players
---
I argue that role did matter a lot. The best teams I encountered had 2 science ships --- closing all the rifts before any real enemy buildup, keeping 10/10 station, 5/5 power and 40+ rifts closed. Teams with no sci ships were the worst, often closing 20 or less rifts and often losing the station to npc swarm. I suppose a team can out-dps the encounter but escorts had no advantage here. It was infinitely easier to just close more rifts than to try to shoot everything (excluding having 2-3 top dps players that actually can shoot everything).
Forced teamwork in a game where only a small fraction of the playerbase understands such a concept. You will invariably be abandoned to fend for yourself. Nice idea on paper, unworkable in practice.
Actually this game needs more missions that require teamwork "forced teamwork" if you will.
But a time gated event like this is the wrong place to introduce that.
If I'd be paranoid I'd say they made in intentional in that obviously flawed way, so they can later state "hey we did teamwork, nobody liked it, so no teamwork in the future"
As always, as with every other piece of sto content, this board was best suited to a ship using as much faw as it can.
You dont need teamwork, or even teammates, you need Faw. There is nothing more powerful then Faw.
FawOnline.
Only for top players or solid fleet teams. Most of the FAW cowboy teams I was forced to endure were fail 30-35 mark teams. A couple of top scimitar teams splatted everything and we did well, but the bulk were low dps beam "cruisers" that may as well have been afk for all the good they did.
FAW in the right hands is overwhelming, yes. Which is about 1/50 of the people that try to use the build. The other 49 are mostly light entertainment... they zerg up the middle, make everything mad, and die, or flap around trying to power up the stations or close a rift or 2 but can barely do that due to low dps and too many enemy.
Only for top players or solid fleet teams. Most of the FAW cowboy teams I was forced to endure were fail 30-35 mark teams. A couple of top scimitar teams splatted everything and we did well, but the bulk were low dps beam "cruisers" that may as well have been afk for all the good they did.
FAW in the right hands is overwhelming, yes. Which is about 1/50 of the people that try to use the build. The other 49 are mostly light entertainment... they zerg up the middle, make everything mad, and die, or flap around trying to power up the stations or close a rift or 2 but can barely do that due to low dps and too many enemy.
Yup, this.
FAW is not the 'I-win' button.
It can be the last of a sequence of moves that constitute 'I win', but unless the captain sets things up properly and has a fairly good sense of situational awareness, it'll be a damp squib.
Comments
it was also lacking any form of story, there was no who what where why when or how. and while voiceovers were decent (sick of obisek lol) the writing of what those voiceovers said was sub par.. and he would say the same things over and over and over and over and over again..
Some penalty other than just losing a few marks should've been implimented for letting the station drop to 0 health. And as the others before me stated some more could've been done to polish it up.
I was on some elite runs where every rift was closed ASAP and at the end, there were zero MU starships present on the board when the MU Dreadnaught spawned. It was rather amusing seeing the cutscene clearing the board of non-existing MU starships. Our final marks reward was around 84 for those runs.
hits:
teamwork required for decent performance unless all uber players
awesome rewards (marks and dil!)
elite mode at least somewhat challenging esp with pug teams
misses:
ship type bonuses should have been captain type. Esp since many ships that should close or power faster cannot (rom ships ... carriers ... etc)
station enemy shove made struggling groups have an even worse time of it
interruptible actions made it harder for weak teams. Basically the worse the team the harder everything became at an increasing rate, while the better teams faced fewer enemy and had an easier go. So it scaled the wrong way for good/bad groups, really. ]
broken boss is coming cutscene out of body immersion breaking mess.
afk/stay dead/do nothing players
---
I argue that role did matter a lot. The best teams I encountered had 2 science ships --- closing all the rifts before any real enemy buildup, keeping 10/10 station, 5/5 power and 40+ rifts closed. Teams with no sci ships were the worst, often closing 20 or less rifts and often losing the station to npc swarm. I suppose a team can out-dps the encounter but escorts had no advantage here. It was infinitely easier to just close more rifts than to try to shoot everything (excluding having 2-3 top dps players that actually can shoot everything).
Actually this game needs more missions that require teamwork "forced teamwork" if you will.
But a time gated event like this is the wrong place to introduce that.
If I'd be paranoid I'd say they made in intentional in that obviously flawed way, so they can later state "hey we did teamwork, nobody liked it, so no teamwork in the future"
You dont need teamwork, or even teammates, you need Faw. There is nothing more powerful then Faw.
FawOnline.
Only for top players or solid fleet teams. Most of the FAW cowboy teams I was forced to endure were fail 30-35 mark teams. A couple of top scimitar teams splatted everything and we did well, but the bulk were low dps beam "cruisers" that may as well have been afk for all the good they did.
FAW in the right hands is overwhelming, yes. Which is about 1/50 of the people that try to use the build. The other 49 are mostly light entertainment... they zerg up the middle, make everything mad, and die, or flap around trying to power up the stations or close a rift or 2 but can barely do that due to low dps and too many enemy.
Yup, this.
FAW is not the 'I-win' button.
It can be the last of a sequence of moves that constitute 'I win', but unless the captain sets things up properly and has a fairly good sense of situational awareness, it'll be a damp squib.