Oh my, whoever thought tying R&D content into fixed events needs shooting, metaphorically speaking of course.
Yet again this Dev team is trying to dictate which content they want us to play. Dont want to play ground STF's, tough, cough up for Zen to advance your R&D. Is it any wonder i'm playing less and less these days. Thats another feature of this so called FTP MMO I wont be bothering with, I already have fully specced R&D alts, so grinding my way to lack lustre items doesn't appeal to me.
Different people enjoy different things...why do you find that amusing?
Because do you really need the new grindy shinies to enjoy what you've been enjoying for the past several months/years in STO?
Also, pitty that some people - like me - actually enjoyed playing Star Clusters... But no, *poof* they're gone, because they'd be too good of a crafting farm. Thanks Cryptic...
I find it kind of amusing that people complain about being forced to grind "boring" content to get stuff needed for their unique new crafting toys they'll end up using in some other "boring" content they've been doing for years now.
I find it amusing that takes out content that Star Trek like that only needed a update replacing it with a half behind monetized time gating gambling system.
On top of it trying to force content that Cryptic can not or will not update. Making the exchange even more exploitable.
I feel the blogs should say.
"Suckers! A special gift to our brain dxxxd customers. Signed Cryptic"
So uinless they change the rate you get the R&D points to level each school, this will not make any difference. As long as it will take me 10 years to get to make max level means I will not be doing crafting at all. NO sense to spend time on something I can never actually get good at or be able to make useful stuff.
Popular in what way..forced to play to get a reward that you can't get anywhere else except maybe a drop from a c-store purchase.
Maybe they should of added the mats to the Clusters instead of just deleting the Clusters? So much fail here but, we see the intent now. To make players play ALL queues more often. It'll be great for noobs, if they have patience to wait for a download they'll need it for the crafting.
Well I think there are Doff assignments in the clusters that will reward mats as well, so they haven't been eradicated, just the roving vacuum cleaner style
I'm curious what the drops from the harvest nodes are gonna be like.
"This means that each queue, based upon where it takes place (ground or space) and a few other factors will only reward one type of very rare material."
Ahh, Cryptic - sometime i think you are trying to drive me away.
We chose not to play specific queues because they are not fun and forcing us to play it will not work. Have you not learned your lesson?
That's part of the equation, another part is that the rewards aren't worth it. For instance I pretty much dropped off playing the Dyson Sphere Space Battle zone when they dropped the rewards to nothing and removed the dilithium reward. It ceased to be worth the time.
They've put the dilithium back for 9.5, which is good and will probably get my time back.
So to translate the latest blog, Trellium-K is going to be worthless as pretty much everyone runs Borg space STFs, everything else is going to be very expensive as noone wants to run the horrible content they have for Undine, Tholian, Voth, ect.
Would have been better to have the rewards be random instead of trying to corral people into playing the boring missions that they don't want to play. Its bad enough having to do these missions to get rep marks, now having gone through that mindless grind you seriously expect people to want to go back and do it again for materials.
It reminds me of the pre-Season 7 Borg reward system where you would get a specific piece of Borg Salvage from each mission. From each type of Queue mission we now get a specific resource. There was a time where in order to get the materials for a MACO ground set, you had to actually play Borg ground STFs. I'm curious to see how well this works out.
"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"
Why is it every time a new system or concept is introduced, it's used to try to railroad players into Queued Events?
When the Dyson Rep was introduced, we suddenly needed Cybernetic Implants to get the only equipment sets available. When the "Rep Revamp" happened, it removed the lower-level Omega equipment sets leaving us with only the ones that require Borg Neural Processors. Now one of the last bastions of independant play - the Crafting System - is going to require playing Queued Events to get materials for high-quality items?
I'm supposed to be captain of a starship, but it feels more like I'm passenger on a train.
This is done so that all queues are busy and people can find a game for every type of content, and do not have to run Infected Elite exclusively.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
That's really not why. I've seen this conspiratorial thought creep up in just about every post on materials. They're removed because they drastically lower the quality of the game for new players who encounter them without knowing "Oh, those missions are 'special'" - and because they drastically increase the game's install size for new players, which prevents hundreds of players each month from even trying out the game in the first place.
Seriously, with "Patch on Demand" enabled by default for new players -- HOW do the exploration clusters increase the initial download size of the game for new players? (And I had two friends just download STO recently - so I know that's the case. Hell, you could just as easily DROP the 'ARC Client' download requirement and REALLY reduce the download size(and annoyance factor) for new players too - yet, here it's the false argument that Exploration clusters are the culprit.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
This is done so that all queues are busy and people can find a game for every type of content, and do not have to run Infected Elite exclusively.
Funny, I would have preferred that they actually make the lesser-used queues worth playing. There is literally nothing they could put as a reward in some of the queues to entice me to join it (looking at you Undine Assault).
Unless they did a great job on distributing the very-rare mats between the various queues, inevitably some mats will be worthless (anything from the Borg Space STFs) and some will be impossibly hard to find and outrageously expensive if you do. If they hold form, they will require the very-rare mats from the least run instances in order to craft the only desireable items in the crafting revamp( ie crafting the 360 beam of awesomeness requires 5 VR Blobs of Gloop, only obtainable from Atmosphere Assault, Undine Assault and The Vault).
This is done so that all queues are busy and people can find a game for every type of content, and do not have to run Infected Elite exclusively.
Are you serious? No, really. Are you serious?
So it's okay for Cryptic to take away free choice of it's players and force them to run other STF's other then the borg?
Agai, are you serious?
If so, all this does it keep me playing the Borg STF'a and if I did play the other ones. I play it with fleet members to dumb through the STF 2 to 7 minutes flat. Then take full advantage of the exchange something collectively.
Oh! I feel so many lock box ships coming to me from EC once this goes live.
Let's see if all the feedback regarding the UI changes will result in any change at all.
I care more about that than about a dev blog about the introduction of 300 ZEN crafting material boxes.
I don't know because Cryptic listened to it's players. Oh yeah! All the people who made UI suggestions, the Tribble UI for the revamp is pretty much the live version.
That's the Alpha testing. By the way, alpha testing is usually done in-house in the software development company. The Tribble is light load testing and UI interface testing for QA but Cryptic pretty much ignores the feedback part.
It reminds me of the pre-Season 7 Borg reward system... I'm curious to see how well this works out.
Forcing/steering us never worked in the past, so it will end like the "Prototype Borg TRIBBLE Tech" System or like making the best Shield "Mark of Honor" exclusive. With us "crying havoc and let slip the dogs of war" in the Forum, ignoring it ingame and Cryptic changing it in 12-18 Months.
I don't know because Cryptic listened to it's players. Oh yeah! All the people who made UI suggestions, the Tribble UI for the revamp is pretty much the live version.
That's the Alpha testing. By the way, alpha testing is usually done in-house in the software development company. The Tribble is light load testing and UI interface testing for QA but Cryptic pretty much ignores the feedback part.
Listen to players. Oh maybe, sure, not.. The Doff UI on tribble is bad, it was said thousand times. They dont care, they just push it, because its new and *shiny*, but is blah compared to what we got now..
I got one thing though, I mentioned it in another thread too. Why rare particle traces give in exchange white/green/blue crafting materials? WHY NOT ONLY BLUE? They are rare already, have only handfull in bank, dont want stupid white/green ones for them..
I really don't think the C-Store packs are worth the ZEN if people like me, who have been stocking up on these materials, will end up with a few thousand of them to work with right at the start.
I really don't think the C-Store packs are worth the ZEN if people like me, who have been stocking up on these materials, will end up with a few thousand of them to work with right at the start.
It's about the Very Rares and Catalysts....
When S9.5 drops, with the conversion the way it is now, I'll have well over 60k mats...won't do me much good without any of the VR mats though.
edit: Hell, add in the Rares and that Particles don't convert to Rares (just a random chance that they might) and I'm going to be needing Rares to get anywhere - will be overloaded with Common/Uncommon out the wahzoo.
Funny, I would have preferred that they actually make the lesser-used queues worth playing. There is literally nothing they could put as a reward in some of the queues to entice me to join it (looking at you Undine Assault).
Unless they did a great job on distributing the very-rare mats between the various queues, inevitably some mats will be worthless (anything from the Borg Space STFs) and some will be impossibly hard to find and outrageously expensive if you do. If they hold form, they will require the very-rare mats from the least run instances in order to craft the only desireable items in the crafting revamp( ie crafting the 360 beam of awesomeness requires 5 VR Blobs of Gloop, only obtainable from Atmosphere Assault, Undine Assault and The Vault).
That right there is a different strokes for different folks moment as I love Undine Assault.
Maybe the reward will be meaningful enough for me to actually play Vault Ensnared though, it's a good mission with garbage rewards (daily box aside).
But the Vault itself ugh, I'll buy from the exchange what I need.
Question for the devs. Will the queues specify what mats will drop from each event?
Forcing/steering us never worked in the past, so it will end like the "Prototype Borg TRIBBLE Tech" System or like making the best Shield "Mark of Honor" exclusive. With us "crying havoc and let slip the dogs of war" in the Forum, ignoring it ingame and Cryptic changing it in 12-18 Months.
I suppose it bears mentioning that I started playing before Season 6 and didn't actually do any STFs until the changeover in Season 7 :P
"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"
In addition to their normal rewards, PvE queues will now drop an additional Research and Development Material Reward Package. This pack comes in two main types - a Normal Queue R&D Material Reward Package and an Advanced Queue R&D Material Reward Package. The normal pack is given as an additional reward in normal queues and contains a random assortment of 20 R&D materials (10 common, uncommon or rare materials, 7 uncommon or rare materials, and 3 rare materials). The Advanced pack, on the other hand, is given as an additional reward in elite queues and contains a random assortment of 25 R&D materials (5 common materials, 10 common, uncommon, rare or very rare materials, 7 uncommon, rare or very rare materials, and 3 rare or very rare materials).
...and, that is how it should be.
'Breaking the Planet', 'Starbase 24', 'Gorn Minefield', and 'The Big Dig' will finally trigger for veteran and 'new' players. As a result of these missions stalling, the 'very new' player base was not able to get enough dilithium.
'Breaking the Planet' and 'The Big Dig' are awesome on so many levels.
What? Did you think I was going to hate this change? rofl...
This is done so that all queues are busy and people can find a game for every type of content, and do not have to run Infected Elite exclusively.
I agree.
Since low level and new players do not have access to stfs, the addition of the R&D packs will make 'fleet actions' more attractive. ...and, it will inject a nice 'diverse' playing field of options.
It's about time there's a reason for running all the different types of queued content, this has been needed since they brought rep in and they removed the tech rewards from STF's, very nicely done Cryptic
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
As a simple material farmer/crafter, this is disappointing to me.
I don't have the best gear, or the fanciest ship, and I'm OK with that, because I hardly ever do PvE. In order to be successful at Elite PvE queues, my understanding is that you need pretty sophisticated equipment.
How am I supposed to get the materials to craft the equipment I need to survive the missions to get the materials? Seems like quite a catch-22 if you're a player who's still moving up in life.
As for adding materials to duty officer missions, I guess material missions will be my new duty officer focus. I would like to know more about the rate of materials gathered from these new missions (I didn't see any the last time I poked around on Tribble). Is this really a sustainable alternative to busting out PvE queues all night?
Kind of a bummer to someone who isn't into all the combat (and I don't see myself paying for crafting materials).
Now that I know that the craftpocalypse is really upon me, I am going to hit the exploration clusters so hard in the next few days and beef up my hoard as much as possible. Maybe I will have enough materials to sustain me for a while in the new system.
So the best way to get samples is to play the old content again! thanks for the new content, lead content designer guy!
I am not seeing how this crafting system is any different than the reps system.
Rep System : Play Queued Missions -> get tokens -> submit assignments -> level up XP -> buy new gear
Crafting System: Play Queued Missions -> get crafting sample -> convent samples -> submit crafting assignments -> level up XP -> craft new gear
am i missing something? or is this just another version of the rep system?
You are correct. As the system stands now it is a more time intensive and expensive system. Wow $3.00 and $10.00 for crafting packs? Ever hear of price points? So far this system is not worth investing any real world dollars into from my perspective or even any dilithium.
As a simple material farmer/crafter, this is disappointing to me.
I don't have the best gear, or the fanciest ship, and I'm OK with that, because I hardly ever do PvE. In order to be successful at Elite PvE queues, my understanding is that you need pretty sophisticated equipment.
How am I supposed to get the materials to craft the equipment I need to survive the missions to get the materials? Seems like quite a catch-22 if you're a player who's still moving up in life.
As for adding materials to duty officer missions, I guess material missions will be my new duty officer focus. I would like to know more about the rate of materials gathered from these new missions (I didn't see any the last time I poked around on Tribble). Is this really a sustainable alternative to busting out PvE queues all night?
Kind of a bummer to someone who isn't into all the combat (and I don't see myself paying for crafting materials).
Now that I know that the craftpocalypse is really upon me, I am going to hit the exploration clusters so hard in the next few days and beef up my hoard as much as possible. Maybe I will have enough materials to sustain me for a while in the new system.
Technically it's possible to complete Elite STFs with MkXI Purple gear. There are plenty who claim to be able to do it with MkX Common gear. Also success in an STF also relies on your team mates as well. Read the guides on the wiki and the forum and you should be fine.
In any event as large as the XP curve is you shouldn't need the rare stuff from the elite queues for a while at least. I am also curious about the rewards from doffing as well. Is there a possibility to acquire the rare mats there for instance?
"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"
Technically it's possible to complete Elite STFs with MkXI Purple gear. There are plenty who claim to be able to do it with MkX Common gear. Also success in an STF also relies on your team mates as well. Read the guides on the wiki and the forum and you should be fine.
In any event as large as the XP curve is you shouldn't need the rare stuff from the elite queues for a while at least. I am also curious about the rewards from doffing as well. Is there a possibility to acquire the rare mats there for instance?
Good to know about the needed equipment; I will definitely look into that. Thanks for sharing.
I guess the other thing is that I wasn't really interested in getting into the hamster wheel that some of my fleet mates get into by running the same PvE queues all the time. I was a happy, no-stress crafting materials farmer in the Klingon nebulas and I guess it stinks having my cheese moved in the game.
If duty officer missions can provide a consistent, plentiful, and reliable flow of crafting materials, it would be an acceptable replacement for me. Having to learn how to do all these PvE missions is not something I look forward to.
I hope you were making a horrible attempt at a joke. Every action about this game is now about monetizing every single bit of code that goes into this game. It is no longer about a company making profit through a game people enjoy. It's the more grind they introduce, the more money people will shell out to get past that grind quicker. And with Star Trek, they know they have a cash cow because the average "True Trekkie" has an infinite wallet when it comes to anything Star Trek. That's why they wouldn't release the odds on the lottery boxes.
-Rule of Acquisition #113: Always have sex with the boss.
-I am one of the many victims from the hijacked Caspian Division.
I will not let the childish acts of a criminal ruin this game for me.
-The actions of Cryptic, on the other hand......
Good to know about the needed equipment; I will definitely look into that. Thanks for sharing.
I guess the other thing is that I wasn't really interested in getting into the hamster wheel that some of my fleet mates get into by running the same PvE queues all the time. I was a happy, no-stress crafting materials farmer in the Klingon nebulas and I guess it stinks having my cheese moved in the game.
If duty officer missions can provide a consistent, plentiful, and reliable flow of crafting materials, it would be an acceptable replacement for me. Having to learn how to do all these PvE missions is not something I look forward to.
I hear you. I'm much more interested in storyline missions than I am in STFs, which is why the reps with story missions attached like the Romulan and Dysons really appealed to me.
That said I also like tinkering with my ship so getting the gear works for me. It took me six months and a group of expert friends to get me to do an STF, and it was another three months before I started doing them regularly.
Fingers crossed that they'll come through and put an exploration revamp in the near future.
"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"
Comments
Yet again this Dev team is trying to dictate which content they want us to play. Dont want to play ground STF's, tough, cough up for Zen to advance your R&D. Is it any wonder i'm playing less and less these days. Thats another feature of this so called FTP MMO I wont be bothering with, I already have fully specced R&D alts, so grinding my way to lack lustre items doesn't appeal to me.
Nail and coffin spring to mind...
Also, pitty that some people - like me - actually enjoyed playing Star Clusters... But no, *poof* they're gone, because they'd be too good of a crafting farm. Thanks Cryptic...
I find it amusing that takes out content that Star Trek like that only needed a update replacing it with a half behind monetized time gating gambling system.
On top of it trying to force content that Cryptic can not or will not update. Making the exchange even more exploitable.
I feel the blogs should say.
"Suckers! A special gift to our brain dxxxd customers. Signed Cryptic"
KDF: Dahar Master Kan (Borg Klingon Tactical)::Dahar Master Torc (Alien Science)::Dahar Master Sisteric (Gorn Engineer)
RR-Fed: Citizen Sirroc (Romulan Science)::Fleet Admiral Grell (Alien Engineer)
RR-KDF: Fleet Admiral Zemo (Reman Tactical)::Fleet Admiral Xinatek (Reman Science)::Fleet Admiral Bel (Alien Engineer)
TOS-Fed: Fleet Admiral Katem (Andorian Tactical)::Lieutenant Commander Straad (Vulcan Engineer)
Dom-Fed: Dan'Tar (Jem'Hadar Science)
Dom-KDF: Kamtana'Solan (Jem'Hadar Science)
CoHost of Tribbles in Ecstasy (Zombee)
I'm curious what the drops from the harvest nodes are gonna be like.
That's part of the equation, another part is that the rewards aren't worth it. For instance I pretty much dropped off playing the Dyson Sphere Space Battle zone when they dropped the rewards to nothing and removed the dilithium reward. It ceased to be worth the time.
They've put the dilithium back for 9.5, which is good and will probably get my time back.
It reminds me of the pre-Season 7 Borg reward system where you would get a specific piece of Borg Salvage from each mission. From each type of Queue mission we now get a specific resource. There was a time where in order to get the materials for a MACO ground set, you had to actually play Borg ground STFs. I'm curious to see how well this works out.
This is done so that all queues are busy and people can find a game for every type of content, and do not have to run Infected Elite exclusively.
Ah, so free choice is just a thing of the past then... I smell what you're shoveling :rolleyes:
Seriously, with "Patch on Demand" enabled by default for new players -- HOW do the exploration clusters increase the initial download size of the game for new players? (And I had two friends just download STO recently - so I know that's the case. Hell, you could just as easily DROP the 'ARC Client' download requirement and REALLY reduce the download size(and annoyance factor) for new players too - yet, here it's the false argument that Exploration clusters are the culprit.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
...and never mind. Cause you can't even see what you'll need before hand now. The L10 crafting projects aren't there unless you're L10 or higher.
/facepalm
Funny, I would have preferred that they actually make the lesser-used queues worth playing. There is literally nothing they could put as a reward in some of the queues to entice me to join it (looking at you Undine Assault).
Unless they did a great job on distributing the very-rare mats between the various queues, inevitably some mats will be worthless (anything from the Borg Space STFs) and some will be impossibly hard to find and outrageously expensive if you do. If they hold form, they will require the very-rare mats from the least run instances in order to craft the only desireable items in the crafting revamp( ie crafting the 360 beam of awesomeness requires 5 VR Blobs of Gloop, only obtainable from Atmosphere Assault, Undine Assault and The Vault).
I care more about that than about a dev blog about the introduction of 300 ZEN crafting material boxes.
Are you serious? No, really. Are you serious?
So it's okay for Cryptic to take away free choice of it's players and force them to run other STF's other then the borg?
Agai, are you serious?
If so, all this does it keep me playing the Borg STF'a and if I did play the other ones. I play it with fleet members to dumb through the STF 2 to 7 minutes flat. Then take full advantage of the exchange something collectively.
Oh! I feel so many lock box ships coming to me from EC once this goes live.
I don't know because Cryptic listened to it's players. Oh yeah! All the people who made UI suggestions, the Tribble UI for the revamp is pretty much the live version.
That's the Alpha testing. By the way, alpha testing is usually done in-house in the software development company. The Tribble is light load testing and UI interface testing for QA but Cryptic pretty much ignores the feedback part.
Forcing/steering us never worked in the past, so it will end like the "Prototype Borg TRIBBLE Tech" System or like making the best Shield "Mark of Honor" exclusive. With us "crying havoc and let slip the dogs of war" in the Forum, ignoring it ingame and Cryptic changing it in 12-18 Months.
Listen to players. Oh maybe, sure, not.. The Doff UI on tribble is bad, it was said thousand times. They dont care, they just push it, because its new and *shiny*, but is blah compared to what we got now..
I got one thing though, I mentioned it in another thread too. Why rare particle traces give in exchange white/green/blue crafting materials? WHY NOT ONLY BLUE? They are rare already, have only handfull in bank, dont want stupid white/green ones for them..
It's about the Very Rares and Catalysts....
When S9.5 drops, with the conversion the way it is now, I'll have well over 60k mats...won't do me much good without any of the VR mats though.
edit: Hell, add in the Rares and that Particles don't convert to Rares (just a random chance that they might) and I'm going to be needing Rares to get anywhere - will be overloaded with Common/Uncommon out the wahzoo.
Maybe the reward will be meaningful enough for me to actually play Vault Ensnared though, it's a good mission with garbage rewards (daily box aside).
But the Vault itself ugh, I'll buy from the exchange what I need.
Question for the devs. Will the queues specify what mats will drop from each event?
I suppose it bears mentioning that I started playing before Season 6 and didn't actually do any STFs until the changeover in Season 7 :P
'Breaking the Planet', 'Starbase 24', 'Gorn Minefield', and 'The Big Dig' will finally trigger for veteran and 'new' players. As a result of these missions stalling, the 'very new' player base was not able to get enough dilithium.
'Breaking the Planet' and 'The Big Dig' are awesome on so many levels.
What? Did you think I was going to hate this change? rofl...
Very nicely done Cryptic.
*thumbs up*
I agree.
Since low level and new players do not have access to stfs, the addition of the R&D packs will make 'fleet actions' more attractive. ...and, it will inject a nice 'diverse' playing field of options.
I absolutely agree.
I don't have the best gear, or the fanciest ship, and I'm OK with that, because I hardly ever do PvE. In order to be successful at Elite PvE queues, my understanding is that you need pretty sophisticated equipment.
How am I supposed to get the materials to craft the equipment I need to survive the missions to get the materials? Seems like quite a catch-22 if you're a player who's still moving up in life.
As for adding materials to duty officer missions, I guess material missions will be my new duty officer focus. I would like to know more about the rate of materials gathered from these new missions (I didn't see any the last time I poked around on Tribble). Is this really a sustainable alternative to busting out PvE queues all night?
Kind of a bummer to someone who isn't into all the combat (and I don't see myself paying for crafting materials).
Now that I know that the craftpocalypse is really upon me, I am going to hit the exploration clusters so hard in the next few days and beef up my hoard as much as possible. Maybe I will have enough materials to sustain me for a while in the new system.
You are correct. As the system stands now it is a more time intensive and expensive system. Wow $3.00 and $10.00 for crafting packs? Ever hear of price points? So far this system is not worth investing any real world dollars into from my perspective or even any dilithium.
Technically it's possible to complete Elite STFs with MkXI Purple gear. There are plenty who claim to be able to do it with MkX Common gear. Also success in an STF also relies on your team mates as well. Read the guides on the wiki and the forum and you should be fine.
In any event as large as the XP curve is you shouldn't need the rare stuff from the elite queues for a while at least. I am also curious about the rewards from doffing as well. Is there a possibility to acquire the rare mats there for instance?
Good to know about the needed equipment; I will definitely look into that. Thanks for sharing.
I guess the other thing is that I wasn't really interested in getting into the hamster wheel that some of my fleet mates get into by running the same PvE queues all the time. I was a happy, no-stress crafting materials farmer in the Klingon nebulas and I guess it stinks having my cheese moved in the game.
If duty officer missions can provide a consistent, plentiful, and reliable flow of crafting materials, it would be an acceptable replacement for me. Having to learn how to do all these PvE missions is not something I look forward to.
I hope you were making a horrible attempt at a joke. Every action about this game is now about monetizing every single bit of code that goes into this game. It is no longer about a company making profit through a game people enjoy. It's the more grind they introduce, the more money people will shell out to get past that grind quicker. And with Star Trek, they know they have a cash cow because the average "True Trekkie" has an infinite wallet when it comes to anything Star Trek. That's why they wouldn't release the odds on the lottery boxes.
-Rule of Acquisition #113: Always have sex with the boss.
-I am one of the many victims from the hijacked Caspian Division.
I will not let the childish acts of a criminal ruin this game for me.
-The actions of Cryptic, on the other hand......
I hear you. I'm much more interested in storyline missions than I am in STFs, which is why the reps with story missions attached like the Romulan and Dysons really appealed to me.
That said I also like tinkering with my ship so getting the gear works for me. It took me six months and a group of expert friends to get me to do an STF, and it was another three months before I started doing them regularly.
Fingers crossed that they'll come through and put an exploration revamp in the near future.