The new crafting system is nice that you can use your doffs for this.. (although I got to get used to the bad layout)
but right now a big part of Qo'nos first city has kinda become useless. not even thinking about the Alpha system.
hope to see something that fix these gaps soon.
"Launch data androids, full spread!"
(thought came to mind after the scene in "nemesis")
Having tried the "old" and "new" crafting systems.. I'd have to say the "new" one is a huge disappointment. It's horribly unclear where to get materials (apparently now the only way to get mats is to mission grind or use duty missions?) ...
You have no way of knowing where to go to get the best chance of the materials you are specifically looking for (another fail)...
It was never explained how to convert the "old" items to new materials (thanks to the community for finding that out.. but it should have been made clear from the outset)
New material graphics are nice.. but the rest of the system is so annoying that .. "meh" ...
From first glance it really does seem like this "ahem" update is a backwards step and one specifically designed to push players into buying more crafting packs for Zen to get things going..
Not terribly impressed at all......
This is actually the 3rd crafting system and is even more painful than the original system.
They do not even give some sort of credit if you had maxed out skill (1650) in the 2nd iteration of the crafting system. This is annoying. Especially since I could make Aegis for my up and coming characters and now I no longer can.
I can only assume seeing the 'impatient finish now with DL' button, combined with the increasing time-to-finish (and increasing in DL) as you rank up, that this 3rd iteration of a crafting system was built around "How do we get more money from players". I can only also assume this was a push from the PWE overlords and not necessarily the planners at Cryptic.
Right off the bat this 3rd system is extremely handicapped.
I don't like the new DOff/crafting UI. It took a well designed UI that players liked and turned it into something that significantly degraded the original. You have more clicks to add DOff's to missions, you have a massive window that is incredibly intrusive to multitasking, and it takes almost twice the time to queue up a single DOff mission over the previous system. On top of that, the ginormous UI makes it impossible to see at a glance what assignments you can do and what you can't. I can understand the want for a UI that incorporates both the DOff and crafting system into one but this is definitely not the way. I have stopped DOff'ing completely and will not be crafting because of this new UI.
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Looking for a new fleet? Drop by the in-game chat channel, "tenforwardforum", and say hi to the members of A Fleet Called Ten Forward (Fed) and The Orion Pirates (KDF). If you already have a fleet you are happy with, please feel free to drop by our chat channel if you are looking for a friendly bunch of helpful people to socialize with.
What is the level progression for crafting; I want to know how many points needed for each level;
such as level zero 0-30
level one 0-150 and so forth?
Could you explain how one goes about converting the old material into the new, please?
Right Click > use
But this menu option only appears when you right click on a mat in your inventory. It will however allow you to convert what's in your bank as well as your inventory.
that didnt work for me.
its actually a ability on your skillbar, cause obviously being friendly to new players is cryptics
top priority.
also, 1.4 gb patch, rofl. LoR wasnt as big, iirc.
reducing installer size, eh?
any more pr bs you wanna drop on us while you mess up the game?
good jahb cryptic, good jahb.
The demand for low mark items is really, really, low. You don't spend much time at low levels.
So the current crafting system that locks you out of high mark items until you reach a certain skill level leads to people only levelling their crafting with the 20h daily, but not actually craft something.
I would recommend adding stuff to craft that can be useful at endgame for the lower skill ratings.
Since all the usual equipment is already taken - how about stacks of consumables?
Large batteries, team batteries, and multi-batteries, repair components and regenerators - they can all be useful, and if the crafting is "cheap" enough - it would be worth doing.
In the long run, you could add some unique crafting consumables.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
The demand for low mark items is really, really, low. You don't spend much time at low levels.
So the current crafting system that locks you out of high mark items until you reach a certain skill level leads to people only levelling their crafting with the 20h daily, but not actually craft something.
I would recommend adding stuff to craft that can be useful at endgame for the lower skill ratings.
Since all the usual equipment is already taken - how about stacks of consumables?
Large batteries, team batteries, and multi-batteries, repair components and regenerators - they can all be useful, and if the crafting is "cheap" enough - it would be worth doing.
In the long run, you could add some unique crafting consumables.
like the new system for the R&D. Only thing is the duty officer you no longer display the locations
which is going to make a bit more difficult to remember. Were to go for the best materials
So the current crafting system that locks you out of high mark items until you reach a certain skill level leads to people only levelling their crafting with the 20h daily, but not actually craft something.
Actually, that isn't why. The reason people level their crafting with the 20h daily is really far more simple: Because the alternative involves CAMPING OUT IN FRONT OF YOUR COMPUTER 24/7, as there are no options to produce larger, longer batches of equipment. The fact that all of the stuff you could possibly produce at low levels is completely worthless is just icing. It wouldn't really matter whether the stuff was useful or not. If you wanted to level crafting, it's either stacking dailies (now nerfed), or 24/7 trashmill, because there are no alternative long-duration projects that produce XP at reasonable cost.
I would recommend adding stuff to craft that can be useful at endgame for the lower skill ratings.
Since all the usual equipment is already taken - how about stacks of consumables?
Large batteries, team batteries, and multi-batteries, repair components and regenerators - they can all be useful, and if the crafting is "cheap" enough - it would be worth doing.
Perhaps, but there's a catch: If those craftings cannot be batch queued, and do not have long durations, they are untenable as a mode of leveling because you would have to camp in front of the computer and constantly queue new instructions. In any event, crafting bulk items ONE AT A TIME is just ungodly annoying.
i'd say camping in front of sto running 24/7 is the bigger problem than computer itself.
these days computers are the equivalent of a tv, a radio, a phone, a typing machine, pen and paper, a mailbox, a book, a shopping catalog, a group of gossiping wives, a newspaper, a sports/gaming/TRIBBLE/etc magazine, a political propaganda machine and few other daily things our ancestors used to "camp in front of" all the time to get away from the horrors of their daily life, which involved staring at a wall or a tree until you die of boredom or a soul crushing 10 hour long jobs that tend to make people suicidal, which the r&d system is very much like if you decide to go for the short projects route. computers became a daily necessity.
while camping in front of a mmo 24/7 is a known problem, see wow.
but that's just semantics, so lol.
Now clowns, that's another story. They scare the crap out of me.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
Here I am, all happy, running 3 daily projects simultaneously, just trying to get crafting to something useful, and Cryptic decides thou shalt not run multiple dailies on a single school. Meanwhile, many master grinders with millions in surplus Dilithium have already paid for maximum crafting levels. They can produce any VR item while the rest of us will now spend a good part of a year getting to sufficient crafting level while they will already be selling those items on the exchange for a nice profit. Thank you, Cryptic, for giving control of the game to a select few and being so generous to them at the expense of the rest of us.
Stupid short sided and biased move. How much did they pay you?:mad:
Player and forumite formerly known as FEELTHETHUNDER
Perhaps, but there's a catch: If those craftings cannot be batch queued, and do not have long durations, they are untenable as a mode of leveling because you would have to camp in front of the computer and constantly queue new instructions. In any event, crafting bulk items ONE AT A TIME is just ungodly annoying.
qft.
Letting us bulk craft components would make crafting a lot more bearable.
Resolved an issue which was allowing players to run multiple Research Training projects from the same school simultaneously.
+ Only 1 Research Training project can be run at a time per school.
During the DS9 episode "Our Man Bashir", the doctor saves the world by destroying it. While many may miss its overall point, the episode talks about the flaw in 'aggressively moving goal posts'. If the villain of a story keeps staying one step ahead, regardless about what the hero does, the hero's need to fulfill a destiny becomes muted.
Other words, sometimes the best solution is to do nothing; thus, the new direction of "Star Trek: Online" has destroyed the whole idea behind playing videos games.
Instead of waiting out a 20 hour timegate, during a three to four month period, the best solution would be to play an entirely different game.
Since players can obtain more rewards, while making more progress, in another game, why would anyone think the R&D, Reputation System, and Fleet Holdings are worth anything?
"Star Trek: Online" is a milk machine.
"Star Trek: Online" has stopped being a video game.
Why wait out timegates when life has more to offer?
No - but your quoted post does not seem to take into account multiple slots allowing you to progress more quickly than 10 xp per minute, which the XP curve assumes you will use. Slots 4 and 5 are actually totally bonus and were added in playtesting, and we didn't go back and scale XP around them. By my calculations, it will take 350 hours of R+D to hit level 15, almost all of which can be offline time assuming a large starting resource stockpile.
The system's supposed to be a long-term goal for level 15, and even more so for level 20. Not everyone will like that, but some people will like it very much.
"Is the amount of XP required...going to be looked at"? Maybe. The XP curve is structured the way it is because the system is designed for 4 different types of player - super casual, casual, midcore, and super hardcore. It's less of a curve and more of 4 different curves stuck together - thus the extreme breakpoint around level 3 that many players have noticed.
As you point out, the initial XP values are extremely low. Part of this is due to the tutorial that isn't in-game yet - we give you the components to make a Mark 2 item for free and walk you through the creation process. We wanted that creation to give you enough XP to hit level 1 - so 1 5-minute project had to be enough XP to ding. Another reason it's so low is because you start with only one R+D slot - when you unlock the 2nd and then the 3rd slot, the curves increase in steepness under the assumption you'll do projects in all available slots. (Worth noting that this does NOT occur for the 4th and 5th slots, making all projects you run in those slots "bonus time" from our perspective).
Of course we don't expect players to play 24 hours of the day 7 days a week. We know the patterns of play that most of our players follow, and the system is supposed to be a long-term but achieveable/attainable goal for these players.
...indicating that we are intended to be able to run multiples of the same projects to level, to the point where crafting XP curves are designed around running 3 projects at a time. While they kindly did not further exacerbate the higher crafting XP when adding project slots 4 and 5, it remained a significant chunk of XP. Further, the Research Training project rewards exactly half (1/2, 50%, 300xp/hr vs. 600xp/hr) of the XP rate that other crafting activities do, after having their reward adjusted from 9599 XP to 6000 XP prior to going live.
Then we get...
Systems:
Research and Development:
Resolved an issue which was allowing players to run multiple Research Training projects from the same school simultaneously.
Only 1 Research Training project can be run at a time per school.
...which identifies running multiples of the same project as an "issue" needing to be "resolved". So, now that we cannot in fact use those multiple slots to progress more quickly, are we now looking at getting a less drastic XP curve/requirement for higher levels, possibly cutting XP per level by 1/3 since the 3 planned slots cannot be used for focused advancement?
With each passing day I wonder if I stepped into an alternate reality. The Cubs win the world series. Donald Trump is President. Britain leaves the EU. STO gets a dedicated PvP season. Engineers are "out of control" in STO.
You can still use the multiple slots to advance your crafting. But the problem is you can't use the 20h research project to do so.
It could be that was how they always intended it. Theoretically, the Research project is more like a regular DOFF mission, and you can't run he same DOFF mission twice. Running the same crafting project twice, they needed to add that feature for the crafting task.
Though, really, I think the problem isn't how long it gets to level 20 or level 15. The problem is that it looks to most people that they won't be able to craft anything of value until then.
That's something they need to change. There must be endgame viable game available much sooner. Just like you can get a decent set item in the reputations earlier - you just need to wait to the final tier to craft the final piece. And you also get access to store items in the reputation store way before you complete the reputation.
But then - the reputation system underwent a few major changes recently, too. The cost of grinding up reputation was reduced, you can only get Mark XII item earler than final tier with the season 9 changes, they got rid fo the commodities. Let'S just hope they make similar QOL changes to the crafting system sooner than they did to the rep system.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
This is my wallet, there are many like it but this one is mine.
Todays age shows us that this is more important than words.
I hope they listen to these words as they reflect this wallet.
When the new crafting system was announced, I was happy.
So happy, I thought to invest in a subscription agian or even a lifetime.
Today. I retract those thoughts.
You may not have my wallet now and the money it holds.
Fix the system you messed up, and I may invest in this game again.
Until then. I will not purchase a single thing that requires my wallet.
*Puts his wallet away*
Support the Zen Store & Dil Exchange Boycott! :mad:
I for one, would love an official explanation from an official-type-person as to why the devs want it to take close to a year to grind out one crafting profession.
What exactly was wrong with being able to grind one profession out in roughly a month (before the "fix")?
Also adding my two cents in, I am not happy in the least over this change. It made crafting from something I was interested in doing into yet another boring grind with very little to show for a day's work.
Nope. Not happy. And I'm certainly not going to spend real money on crafting now, either.
The change to number of concurrent research projects isn't the real issue. Its just highlighting the heart of the problem.
Even casual players get to level 50 and want higher end gear (which you can get with 40 days of easy-to-do reputation projects). Whether you are casual or hardcore though you need to reach 15 to craft your own MkXI or MkXII gear (unless you have help from someone who is 15 already of course).
The long duration of reaching 15 by research projects has been covered already. I always hear people mention that it is faster if you craft that way but that also has issues.
1) The material cost of crafting all the way is extreme. To reach level 15 (630,000 XP) would require 1050 crafts at 600 XP each and 34 uncommon materials (plus one common). That is 35700 uncommon mats for one school. Reaching level 20 would require about triple that in total 2 million XP is needed. That's kind of out there for even longtime players.
2) You have to be at your computer a lot more. If you spent 10 hours a day at your computer, for 1050 crafts you would need over 100 days still. That's really extreme considering you could get similar or better items from the less demanding reputations.
3) Its optional, right? We don't have to use crafting, right? That's true. But why are developer resources being used for content that is easily tossed like this then? I think it would make more sense to work on something that keeps people busy in STO and not some other MMO. If you just make crafting more enticing to players you will have everyone here busily crafting away.
I do like the crafting system. Please don't get me wrong on that. But I think it falls outside the example that has been set by the rest of the game for how much time and ingame resources are spent on improvement. It is a good system but just needs a little tweaking to be great.
Since I have done all the other stuff, this is how Season 9.5 will play out for me:
*click - activates 20 hour XP bonus project*
*signs out of 'Star Trek: Online'*
*waits 20 hours*
*click - activates 20 hour XP bonus project*
*signs out of 'Star Trek: Online'*
*waits 20 hours*
*click - activates 20 hour XP bonus project*
*signs out of 'Star Trek: Online'*
*waits 20 hours*
*click - activates 20 hour XP bonus project*
*signs out of 'Star Trek: Online'*
*waits 20 hours*
etc...
If I remember to sign into the game tomorrow, I think there would be some kind of miracle.
I believe the name for that is "Operant Conditioning", sometimes called the Skinner Box. It's a method of altering human behavior based upon antecedents and consequences, and is where the majority of Cryptic's money comes from.
People being forced to compulsively log in once a day to do something was a worry of the old STOked crew back in the months just before the transition to F2P, which is why gold subscribers have automatic daily dilithium refinement.
To be brutally honest this new crafting system reminds me greatly of Trexels. It's a glorified vending machine designed with the expressed purpose of wasting the player's time while demanding hard cash for the luxury of continued use.
I believe the name for that is "Operant Conditioning"...
Yeah, I made a post about that a while ago.
Its annoying.
Since I am seeing its presence more and more, the part of me that loves "Star Trek" is fighting rationality. I am coming to the reality that "Star Trek: Online" will never be great. Although the game does have some epic featured episodes, the annoying aspects of the endgame content overshadows their impact.
Cryptic is a very different company compared to BioWare, 2K, Bethesda, and Obsidian.
Perhaps my expectations of Cryptic should be set to a very low standard.
'Star Trek: Online' will never-ever-ever reach the bar, which single-player games have set over the last fourteen years. "Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic" and "Star Wars: The Sith Lords" are so much more advanced than 'Star Trek: Online'. Heck, I think "Dragon Age: Origins" set the standard for future roleplaying games.
While Cryptic is approaching games with an old-school mentality, the other companies are leaving it in the dust.
Here I am, all happy, running 3 daily projects simultaneously, just trying to get crafting to something useful, and Cryptic decides thou shalt not run multiple dailies on a single school. Meanwhile, many master grinders with millions in surplus Dilithium have already paid for maximum crafting levels. They can produce any VR item while the rest of us will now spend a good part of a year getting to sufficient crafting level while they will already be selling those items on the exchange for a nice profit. Thank you, Cryptic, for giving control of the game to a select few and being so generous to them at the expense of the rest of us.
They can't "control" the game when what they're selling isn't actually that good . The crafted gear doesn't jump out when compared to elite fleet / rep stuff. [Rapid] for example is a *chance* to initiate a short burst of CRF - but serious players will already have got the full skill at near-global, and you're trading off a crit / acc / damage mod / proc for the privilege. Even the PVP mods - a couple of percent acc, etc - are novel but pretty balanced.
Likewise, the 360' beams - again, a nice item, but hardly essential; and you can always go AP if you want to get one NAOW. When prices drop (and they will) I might consider one for my beamboat and sci destroyer. But they certainly aren't game changers. Contrast this to the fleet Tac / Eng consoles, where the Fleet versions are so much better than their regular counterparts that it's not even funny.
The only real standout stuff to me in the crafting system is the Beam and Eng traits - and again, those have very stiff competition for slots from the growing number of lockbox traits, and they can't be traded.
So what? IMO, this looks like a massive "meh" change. I'm quite happy to click a few times to run research projects - across 5 alts that takes, oh, 2 minutes a day? - and in 6 months time I might get one of those useful traits. In the meantime there is plenty of more accessible fleet, rep and lockbox gear around.
I'll be arrogant and describe myself as a "casual veteran" - someone who's been playing for years but is not obsessed with being at the absolute top end of power creep - and I think the following of crafting:
(1) It's another thing to do, if you're one of those people who spends 12 hours a day on an MMO, which opens up some interesting equipment options.
(2) Casual players can just run research dailies and will *eventually* get somewhere at near zero time / effort cost.
(3) The rewards of crafting are insufficient to justify spending time and dilithium on except for a small number of cases who, literally, have more than they know what to do with.
So what?
The system is a *Fail* in that it's clunky, unfriendly and has very poor rewards in its early stages. After a few times crafting items I go so fed up trying to track the materials, components etc needed that I just got bored. A particular hate of mine is the 30s - 1min "pauses" while crafting a component; who in the name of sanity thought this was anything other than torturing players? It's not long enough to go away and do something else, but is literally a thumb-twiddling session.
The system is good in that I don't think it's skewed the metagame in terms of rampant power creep (unlike the Fleet system). This means that it's easy to ignore.
So what? I guess a lot depends on what Cryptic expected. If Crafting was intended to be a diversion for the most fanatical players, produced at minimal expense by the Dev team, then I would say it's a success. It can eat huge ammounts of player time but can equally be ignored.
If it was meant to be a mechanism for giving solo players an alternative to relying on fleet gear for the best equipment, it's an utter failure because of the stuttering, insanely protracted level of gring required and the tortuous process of actually crafting anything.
I believe the name for that is "Operant Conditioning", sometimes called the Skinner Box. It's a method of altering human behavior based upon antecedents and consequences, and is where the majority of Cryptic's money comes from.
People being forced to compulsively log in once a day to do something was a worry of the old STOked crew back in the months just before the transition to F2P, which is why gold subscribers have automatic daily dilithium refinement.
To be brutally honest this new crafting system reminds me greatly of Trexels. It's a glorified vending machine designed with the expressed purpose of wasting the player's time while demanding hard cash for the luxury of continued use.
The simple solution is to not sign in to obsess over things unless you're actually enjoying the game at the time.
I've played STO on and off since it launched - I go for months without playing it, then I get a hankering for it and play it for a few weeks, then off again, then on again.
Each time I play it, I obsess with dailies and doing everything on all my toons. When I lose interest, there's a couple of days where I think I should still be obsessing and logging in at least to do a few DOFFs, refined some of my fund of dil, etc.
But then I realize, why bother? In that time of casual on/off playing, I've done all my reps, gotten all the rep gear I need, given Cryptic some money, enjoyed myself immensely for a while, then suddenly gotten bored, etc., etc.
It's a free to play game, which means, you don't have to feel compelled to log on just to get your value out of a subscription. Just drop it when you get bored, forget about it, then be into it and obsess over it when you're into it and obsessing over it.
Cryptic only gets my money when I'm actually enjoying playing.
Ok running the hourly projects on more than 1 character is way too much of a drag and it'll be way too expensive in the long run. If you are sticking with the one 20 hour please please let us build many components at the same time. If you want to limit it to the # of slots we have open ok. But 1 at a time just hurts too much.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
More actual bug:
-- the hologram DOs we got to get started crafting are the SOURCE of the bug of not being able to start some missions. The interface puts the holograms in and thinks the player qualifies for the missions, but there seems to be a conflicting "you cant use those for missions" logic, and the interface is left in confusion. So the reality is the player (probably??) cannot do the mission (missing officer) and the bug is the interface assigning the crafting holos to it by mistake?
More quality of life updates:
-we NEED BADLY bulk crafting of components. The 20 seconds to complete is just constant clicking. Let me make 10 components at once click, even if you make it take 10 min, PLEASE. Ideally we could have a slider and pick from 1-100 to make, and multiply the time factor, but I would settle for a fixed amount made at one go.
- it would be "nice" if we could mash a "repeat" button. I have 3 slots open now, and if I want to make 3 of the same thing, I should not have to click 5 times to do it, just add a repeat this task button to the final page that is displayed after choosing "start".
And some praise
the work backwards from the goal feature is sweet. Click on what you want to make, and if you are missing something, click on that to make it (component), very nice. Here again a touch of polish won't hurt... if the interface "remembered" the last "product" we were trying to make it would be a little bit better.
The "this is what you need" feature would be awesome if it worked like a stack, where you could craft a needed component, and then go back to the finished product that you were trying to craft.
Now for a couple of complaints;
The mark 8 gear requires too many rare materials. If this trend continues with even higher end items, people will easily be swamped with low end mats, yet unable to craft anything they want.
I'm leveling a character in her 20s at the moment. The only way she can get mats at the moment is science, exploration, and stuff she finds during missions. Unfortunately, the doff bug really limits the science missions she can do. So, effectively, other than the research missions, she can't craft. (I ended up shipping her a couple hundred mats from one of my other characters as a work around. If I was a new player, I'd find this VERY annoying.)
Comments
but right now a big part of Qo'nos first city has kinda become useless. not even thinking about the Alpha system.
hope to see something that fix these gaps soon.
(thought came to mind after the scene in "nemesis")
This is actually the 3rd crafting system and is even more painful than the original system.
They do not even give some sort of credit if you had maxed out skill (1650) in the 2nd iteration of the crafting system. This is annoying. Especially since I could make Aegis for my up and coming characters and now I no longer can.
I can only assume seeing the 'impatient finish now with DL' button, combined with the increasing time-to-finish (and increasing in DL) as you rank up, that this 3rd iteration of a crafting system was built around "How do we get more money from players". I can only also assume this was a push from the PWE overlords and not necessarily the planners at Cryptic.
Right off the bat this 3rd system is extremely handicapped.
Romulan Institute
D'Galan - Engineer
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my official feedback, who stole my craylons! joke aside any word on a fix?
such as level zero 0-30
level one 0-150 and so forth?
that didnt work for me.
its actually a ability on your skillbar, cause obviously being friendly to new players is cryptics
top priority.
also, 1.4 gb patch, rofl. LoR wasnt as big, iirc.
reducing installer size, eh?
any more pr bs you wanna drop on us while you mess up the game?
good jahb cryptic, good jahb.
So the current crafting system that locks you out of high mark items until you reach a certain skill level leads to people only levelling their crafting with the 20h daily, but not actually craft something.
I would recommend adding stuff to craft that can be useful at endgame for the lower skill ratings.
Since all the usual equipment is already taken - how about stacks of consumables?
Large batteries, team batteries, and multi-batteries, repair components and regenerators - they can all be useful, and if the crafting is "cheap" enough - it would be worth doing.
In the long run, you could add some unique crafting consumables.
this plus one
which is going to make a bit more difficult to remember. Were to go for the best materials
Perhaps, but there's a catch: If those craftings cannot be batch queued, and do not have long durations, they are untenable as a mode of leveling because you would have to camp in front of the computer and constantly queue new instructions. In any event, crafting bulk items ONE AT A TIME is just ungodly annoying.
these days computers are the equivalent of a tv, a radio, a phone, a typing machine, pen and paper, a mailbox, a book, a shopping catalog, a group of gossiping wives, a newspaper, a sports/gaming/TRIBBLE/etc magazine, a political propaganda machine and few other daily things our ancestors used to "camp in front of" all the time to get away from the horrors of their daily life, which involved staring at a wall or a tree until you die of boredom or a soul crushing 10 hour long jobs that tend to make people suicidal, which the r&d system is very much like if you decide to go for the short projects route. computers became a daily necessity.
while camping in front of a mmo 24/7 is a known problem, see wow.
but that's just semantics, so lol.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
Here I am, all happy, running 3 daily projects simultaneously, just trying to get crafting to something useful, and Cryptic decides thou shalt not run multiple dailies on a single school. Meanwhile, many master grinders with millions in surplus Dilithium have already paid for maximum crafting levels. They can produce any VR item while the rest of us will now spend a good part of a year getting to sufficient crafting level while they will already be selling those items on the exchange for a nice profit. Thank you, Cryptic, for giving control of the game to a select few and being so generous to them at the expense of the rest of us.
Stupid short sided and biased move. How much did they pay you?:mad:
Player and forumite formerly known as FEELTHETHUNDER
Expatriot Might Characters in EXILE
qft.
Letting us bulk craft components would make crafting a lot more bearable.
6 mos to 15 and a year for all.
"The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play." - James T. Kirk
Other words, sometimes the best solution is to do nothing; thus, the new direction of "Star Trek: Online" has destroyed the whole idea behind playing videos games.
Instead of waiting out a 20 hour timegate, during a three to four month period, the best solution would be to play an entirely different game.
Since players can obtain more rewards, while making more progress, in another game, why would anyone think the R&D, Reputation System, and Fleet Holdings are worth anything?
"Star Trek: Online" is a milk machine.
"Star Trek: Online" has stopped being a video game.
Why wait out timegates when life has more to offer?
Cryptic needs to do some soul searching.
I hope Cryptic wakes up.
Then we get... ...which identifies running multiples of the same project as an "issue" needing to be "resolved". So, now that we cannot in fact use those multiple slots to progress more quickly, are we now looking at getting a less drastic XP curve/requirement for higher levels, possibly cutting XP per level by 1/3 since the 3 planned slots cannot be used for focused advancement?
It could be that was how they always intended it. Theoretically, the Research project is more like a regular DOFF mission, and you can't run he same DOFF mission twice. Running the same crafting project twice, they needed to add that feature for the crafting task.
Though, really, I think the problem isn't how long it gets to level 20 or level 15. The problem is that it looks to most people that they won't be able to craft anything of value until then.
That's something they need to change. There must be endgame viable game available much sooner. Just like you can get a decent set item in the reputations earlier - you just need to wait to the final tier to craft the final piece. And you also get access to store items in the reputation store way before you complete the reputation.
But then - the reputation system underwent a few major changes recently, too. The cost of grinding up reputation was reduced, you can only get Mark XII item earler than final tier with the season 9 changes, they got rid fo the commodities. Let'S just hope they make similar QOL changes to the crafting system sooner than they did to the rep system.
This is my wallet, there are many like it but this one is mine.
Todays age shows us that this is more important than words.
I hope they listen to these words as they reflect this wallet.
When the new crafting system was announced, I was happy.
So happy, I thought to invest in a subscription agian or even a lifetime.
Today. I retract those thoughts.
You may not have my wallet now and the money it holds.
Fix the system you messed up, and I may invest in this game again.
Until then. I will not purchase a single thing that requires my wallet.
*Puts his wallet away*
Support the Zen Store & Dil Exchange Boycott! :mad:
Oh the humanity.... Oh the insanity.... Oh the Empty Queue bugs....
What exactly was wrong with being able to grind one profession out in roughly a month (before the "fix")?
Also adding my two cents in, I am not happy in the least over this change. It made crafting from something I was interested in doing into yet another boring grind with very little to show for a day's work.
Nope. Not happy. And I'm certainly not going to spend real money on crafting now, either.
Even casual players get to level 50 and want higher end gear (which you can get with 40 days of easy-to-do reputation projects). Whether you are casual or hardcore though you need to reach 15 to craft your own MkXI or MkXII gear (unless you have help from someone who is 15 already of course).
The long duration of reaching 15 by research projects has been covered already. I always hear people mention that it is faster if you craft that way but that also has issues.
1) The material cost of crafting all the way is extreme. To reach level 15 (630,000 XP) would require 1050 crafts at 600 XP each and 34 uncommon materials (plus one common). That is 35700 uncommon mats for one school. Reaching level 20 would require about triple that in total 2 million XP is needed. That's kind of out there for even longtime players.
2) You have to be at your computer a lot more. If you spent 10 hours a day at your computer, for 1050 crafts you would need over 100 days still. That's really extreme considering you could get similar or better items from the less demanding reputations.
3) Its optional, right? We don't have to use crafting, right? That's true. But why are developer resources being used for content that is easily tossed like this then? I think it would make more sense to work on something that keeps people busy in STO and not some other MMO. If you just make crafting more enticing to players you will have everyone here busily crafting away.
I do like the crafting system. Please don't get me wrong on that. But I think it falls outside the example that has been set by the rest of the game for how much time and ingame resources are spent on improvement. It is a good system but just needs a little tweaking to be great.
Please make the R+D XP curve a little less steep.
Member since December 2009
I believe the name for that is "Operant Conditioning", sometimes called the Skinner Box. It's a method of altering human behavior based upon antecedents and consequences, and is where the majority of Cryptic's money comes from.
People being forced to compulsively log in once a day to do something was a worry of the old STOked crew back in the months just before the transition to F2P, which is why gold subscribers have automatic daily dilithium refinement.
To be brutally honest this new crafting system reminds me greatly of Trexels. It's a glorified vending machine designed with the expressed purpose of wasting the player's time while demanding hard cash for the luxury of continued use.
Its annoying.
Since I am seeing its presence more and more, the part of me that loves "Star Trek" is fighting rationality. I am coming to the reality that "Star Trek: Online" will never be great. Although the game does have some epic featured episodes, the annoying aspects of the endgame content overshadows their impact.
Cryptic is a very different company compared to BioWare, 2K, Bethesda, and Obsidian.
Perhaps my expectations of Cryptic should be set to a very low standard.
'Star Trek: Online' will never-ever-ever reach the bar, which single-player games have set over the last fourteen years. "Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic" and "Star Wars: The Sith Lords" are so much more advanced than 'Star Trek: Online'. Heck, I think "Dragon Age: Origins" set the standard for future roleplaying games.
While Cryptic is approaching games with an old-school mentality, the other companies are leaving it in the dust.
I think I have hit the acceptance stage.
They can't "control" the game when what they're selling isn't actually that good
Likewise, the 360' beams - again, a nice item, but hardly essential; and you can always go AP if you want to get one NAOW. When prices drop (and they will) I might consider one for my beamboat and sci destroyer. But they certainly aren't game changers. Contrast this to the fleet Tac / Eng consoles, where the Fleet versions are so much better than their regular counterparts that it's not even funny.
The only real standout stuff to me in the crafting system is the Beam and Eng traits - and again, those have very stiff competition for slots from the growing number of lockbox traits, and they can't be traded.
So what? IMO, this looks like a massive "meh" change. I'm quite happy to click a few times to run research projects - across 5 alts that takes, oh, 2 minutes a day? - and in 6 months time I might get one of those useful traits. In the meantime there is plenty of more accessible fleet, rep and lockbox gear around.
I'll be arrogant and describe myself as a "casual veteran" - someone who's been playing for years but is not obsessed with being at the absolute top end of power creep - and I think the following of crafting:
(1) It's another thing to do, if you're one of those people who spends 12 hours a day on an MMO, which opens up some interesting equipment options.
(2) Casual players can just run research dailies and will *eventually* get somewhere at near zero time / effort cost.
(3) The rewards of crafting are insufficient to justify spending time and dilithium on except for a small number of cases who, literally, have more than they know what to do with.
So what?
The system is a *Fail* in that it's clunky, unfriendly and has very poor rewards in its early stages. After a few times crafting items I go so fed up trying to track the materials, components etc needed that I just got bored. A particular hate of mine is the 30s - 1min "pauses" while crafting a component; who in the name of sanity thought this was anything other than torturing players? It's not long enough to go away and do something else, but is literally a thumb-twiddling session.
The system is good in that I don't think it's skewed the metagame in terms of rampant power creep (unlike the Fleet system). This means that it's easy to ignore.
So what? I guess a lot depends on what Cryptic expected. If Crafting was intended to be a diversion for the most fanatical players, produced at minimal expense by the Dev team, then I would say it's a success. It can eat huge ammounts of player time but can equally be ignored.
If it was meant to be a mechanism for giving solo players an alternative to relying on fleet gear for the best equipment, it's an utter failure because of the stuttering, insanely protracted level of gring required and the tortuous process of actually crafting anything.
The simple solution is to not sign in to obsess over things unless you're actually enjoying the game at the time.
I've played STO on and off since it launched - I go for months without playing it, then I get a hankering for it and play it for a few weeks, then off again, then on again.
Each time I play it, I obsess with dailies and doing everything on all my toons. When I lose interest, there's a couple of days where I think I should still be obsessing and logging in at least to do a few DOFFs, refined some of my fund of dil, etc.
But then I realize, why bother? In that time of casual on/off playing, I've done all my reps, gotten all the rep gear I need, given Cryptic some money, enjoyed myself immensely for a while, then suddenly gotten bored, etc., etc.
It's a free to play game, which means, you don't have to feel compelled to log on just to get your value out of a subscription. Just drop it when you get bored, forget about it, then be into it and obsess over it when you're into it and obsessing over it.
Cryptic only gets my money when I'm actually enjoying playing.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
-- the hologram DOs we got to get started crafting are the SOURCE of the bug of not being able to start some missions. The interface puts the holograms in and thinks the player qualifies for the missions, but there seems to be a conflicting "you cant use those for missions" logic, and the interface is left in confusion. So the reality is the player (probably??) cannot do the mission (missing officer) and the bug is the interface assigning the crafting holos to it by mistake?
More quality of life updates:
-we NEED BADLY bulk crafting of components. The 20 seconds to complete is just constant clicking. Let me make 10 components at once click, even if you make it take 10 min, PLEASE. Ideally we could have a slider and pick from 1-100 to make, and multiply the time factor, but I would settle for a fixed amount made at one go.
- it would be "nice" if we could mash a "repeat" button. I have 3 slots open now, and if I want to make 3 of the same thing, I should not have to click 5 times to do it, just add a repeat this task button to the final page that is displayed after choosing "start".
And some praise
the work backwards from the goal feature is sweet. Click on what you want to make, and if you are missing something, click on that to make it (component), very nice. Here again a touch of polish won't hurt... if the interface "remembered" the last "product" we were trying to make it would be a little bit better.
Now for a couple of complaints;
The mark 8 gear requires too many rare materials. If this trend continues with even higher end items, people will easily be swamped with low end mats, yet unable to craft anything they want.
I'm leveling a character in her 20s at the moment. The only way she can get mats at the moment is science, exploration, and stuff she finds during missions. Unfortunately, the doff bug really limits the science missions she can do. So, effectively, other than the research missions, she can't craft. (I ended up shipping her a couple hundred mats from one of my other characters as a work around. If I was a new player, I'd find this VERY annoying.)