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Level 15 rare/VR crafting doffs locked away behind the paywall
lucho80
Member Posts: 6,600 Bug Hunter
I'm guessing because of a last minute time-crunch with S9.5 and that combined with wanting to milk some more $ out of players, the rare and VR crafting R&D doffs were all created to only exist in the lockbox.
Will a set of R&D doffs ever be added to the normal avenues of obtaining them? It seems all the doffs we have right now are:
1) White ones from the 1,000 dil assignment that isn't guaranteed to drop them and has a 48 hour time wait followed by a 48 hour cooldown. These sell for 7million EC+.
2) That one rare Ferengi R&D doff.
3) The VR R&D doffs which are all from the Xindi lockbox.
Can we please get all rarities and types of R&D doffs added into the rest of the game? What do I mean by that?
1) Asylum on X
2) Cultural Exchange
3) Personnel officer (And lower the dil tax on the grinder while you're at it. With all the dil/EC nerfs, there is no upside to using it)
4) Prisioner Exchange
5) Officer Exchange (Paradan, Bajor, Cardassia)
etc...
Will a set of R&D doffs ever be added to the normal avenues of obtaining them? It seems all the doffs we have right now are:
1) White ones from the 1,000 dil assignment that isn't guaranteed to drop them and has a 48 hour time wait followed by a 48 hour cooldown. These sell for 7million EC+.
2) That one rare Ferengi R&D doff.
3) The VR R&D doffs which are all from the Xindi lockbox.
Can we please get all rarities and types of R&D doffs added into the rest of the game? What do I mean by that?
1) Asylum on X
2) Cultural Exchange
3) Personnel officer (And lower the dil tax on the grinder while you're at it. With all the dil/EC nerfs, there is no upside to using it)
4) Prisioner Exchange
5) Officer Exchange (Paradan, Bajor, Cardassia)
etc...
Post edited by lucho80 on
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^^This.
I couldn't agree more.
Bad enough that GETTING to lvl 15 in the crafting system is such a drag, but then getting there and not having the proper DOff's to allow crafting of any of the unique lvl 15 items is really annoying.
I guess that the fine folks at Cryptic think that anyone who is willing to go through the hassle of leveling up the crafting system is also going to be of the mindset to spend lots and lots of real world money to get everything they need to do said crafting, including the DOff's.
Since I'm not of that mindset and don't have the needed DOff's to craft those lvl 15 items yet, I guess I'll just muddle through as best I can, hopefully getting the DOff's I need from the 1k dil R&D mission from the academies.
Another nice thing I wish they'd add, is a way to search the exchange for R&D DOff's. If you don't know the exact name of the DOff you're looking for, for a particular school, good luck finding it.
You'll need it.
Set a man on fire and keep him warm for the rest of his life.
They are locked behind a Timegate, and for once in STO the timegate can be circumvented by paying.
You are by no means required or expected to pay to reach lvl 15, or use the aformentioned Doffs, the idea that lockbox/lobi only implies a Paywall is no different then how and box/lobi ships are locked up, which they are not, since you can buy them for EC (which technically has no gate at all) I am sorry that you feel some inadequacy among people who are willing to pay for the shortcuts, but these avenues are what makes STO free for you to play
Please, use your time to complain about things that acually have an impact on the whole community, not just your own financial constraints, impatience, and envy.
This so much this. I think I may have donated some to the fleet and I know when they didn't sale on the exchange I deleted them in the return mail box. Yes...Yes I did. All by accident of course. I have a bad habit of clicky,clicky,clicky without paying attention. My bad but if they were marked or in a diffrent section this would not have happened. My mistake but I think it does need fixed somehow.
You aren't fully reading into the problem. *SIGH*
The paywall in question is the 10,000,000 EC ceiling for f2p players. All of the VR lockbox DOFFs are priced well above that ceiling. From time to time you will see the price dip below, so you'd better act fast.
The options available to a f2p player:
1.) If you trust your fleetmates, you can push the EC into the Fleet Bank and have a lifer/paying member purchase the DOFF for you.
2.) If you like playing lockbox roulette, you can take your chances. If you do happen to get a VR DOFF, but not the one you want; you'll have to sell for 10M or do a variant of #1 above.
3.) You can do the R&D Assistance project on all of your characters and eventually get a common to allow you to do the special project. Then you can buy Catalysts from the exchange to bridge the gap.
When did the commons start selling for 7M+ ?
If I understand this correctly, then the price of these R&D doffs, as well as the special items that require them to be crafted, is about to skyrocket on the Exchange, since
(1) the Xindi lockbox will soon stop dropping
and
(2) many people are about to hit level 15, if they haven't already.
What's funny is that Cryptic gave us a bunch of white doffs with the launch of the new crafting system so that we would have "all the necessary doffs to participate in crafting", yet none of them can be used to craft special items. (Of course, they can't be put on doff assignments either, so they're pretty much completely useless.)
Actually, they can go on DOFF assignments. My particular favorite is Execute Mutineers.
Interesting. I must have been misled by the Tribble patch notes.
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1155781
I see that they were changed for Holodeck.
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1166951
It's kind of trip, one of the few areas where Fed DOFFs go for more than KDF DOFFs.
All the same though, some folks are working with antiquated name lists of the DOFFs. You can find DOFFs that provide the same functionality going for 500k right alongside the others going for 6.8m+...
...no doubt they're not all like that, some you might only find 2m next to the 5m - but folks should research the Exchange to see what DOFFs will suit their needs instead of going off some of the original/older lists of the available R&D Common DOFFs.
As an aside, it's a heinous trip how cheap the KDF DOFFs are compared to the Fed DOFFs for this.
The reason for this is most likely that it is a pain to search for these doffs. The Exchange search is inefficient in many ways, but this is one of the worst symptoms. I'm not an economist, but I think the difficulty of finding information contributes to market inefficiency: it takes longer for prices to reach equilibrium.
Sort Descending, you can find the various high priced Common DOFFs - make a list/noting their R&D schools if they have one (some are just overpriced Common DOFFs). To an extent, some folks have already done that - there are various partial lists out there.
As one fills out their lists - they can just search the names. They're not random names. The R&D DOFFs have fixed names.
As for prices reaching some sort of equilibrium, much of it comes down to some Exchange PvP and taking advantage of folks not taking even the simplest steps to get the better deal. You can get somebody to pay twice as much for a bunch of items because they never change the sorting... won't apply to DOFFs which don't stack, but there's just so many things out there like that. Most players don't take any initiative - some do...just like the rest of the game.
As someone else has pointed out if they:
1) Don't make any new R&D doffs (of all rarities), specially ones that drop off in the normal ways
2) Don't make new R&D doffs in the new lockbox
It will create a worse scarcity situation. The white doffs are junk, and that is what they create, junk. You then have to use superior upgrades and dil to fix that junk.
I understand that, and I have occasionally bought an item off the Exchange for an absurdly cheap price. I'd still like the ability to search the Exchange for active roster abilities and R&D schools though.
It is a paywall. Lock boxes need keys. Keys are only available thru the Z-store and requires Zen. Those found on the exchanged was BOUGHT from the Z-store with Zen. Someone has to buy them. Also time=money.
Yeah you can grind for dil and put it on the dil exchange for zen... but guess what... only way to get Zen is to buy it... and someone has to buy the zen as well to put it on the exchange.
So you can use EC or Dil to compensate someone else from spending real money... but at the end of the day, real money was spent.
The EC cap increase is 500 zen iirc?
If someone can't cobble together the 80k dil to buy that in a reasonable period of time, they're probbaly not going to accomplish anything with the R&D system anyways. Infact they're probbaly never going to get enough EC to need the cap increase.
I'm almost certain I've put a couple on the exchange for 20 - 30 K since I'm still low level in R&D and hadn't seen the part about "regular" doffs not being able to craft some items.
Sigh, and Grrr!
Why make "R&D" doffs that look exactly like regular doffs, and that have no obvious benefit in the R&D UI until you reach 15?
Their text in the roster also doesn't explain why a white R&D doff is better than a purple regular doff with the same specialization
My question as well.
This on top of the cost of leveling to 15 and the inputs to make item. Hardly worth it when you can buy the crafted item for 12 million on the exchange. The very rare inputs to make isolinear items is so high its more than the item cost and forget about trying to earn them in game.
I decided not to bother doing any more crafting until the Doffs and the resources needed to craft come down to earth from orbit. There is no good reason not to have multiple avenues to obtain these doffs. You could put them on the Spire for dilithium and fleet credits or several other places already mentioned above. Make an R&D doff pack from the c-store even.
Lifetime Sub since June 2010
No, he's right- it's a timegate. Dil is used to buy zen, thats used to buy keys to open lockboxes that have lobi, that can be used to buy from the store, or the converted zen can be used to unlock the 10mil ec limit on F2P accounts. Everything in the exchange can be bought with ec (a different currency , and a secondary way to acquire items if the zen grind is too much to bare).
The timegate is the 8k dil refining limit per day, and the floating value of zen compared to the fixed value of dilithium. Zen will ALWAYS be available in the dilith market, it's just a question of whether you want to pay what it's current conversion price is today, or wait till tomorrow and hope the price hasn't doubled.
Look at it this way- at 8k a day and a 155 dilith per zen price a single player can buy a 3k zen c-store ship in 58+ days,
-or-
an 800 lobi ship in about 485 days.(@ 4 lobi per box opened)
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG