test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Delta Rising from the casual's perspective
gofasternow
Member Posts: 1,390 Arc User
Y'know, I see a lot of people going on and on about how Delta Rising is the thing that's going to drive off casuals. That it is a money grabbing scheme and that Cryptic is being greedy monsters and all of that jazz.
Lemme tell you something: I'm a casual. I only play an hour a day at least, mostly because I have the attention span of a gnat and other things need to keep my attention. I only started focusing on DPS stuff just before the expansion dropped. I don't have VR DOFFs that I gathered from other locations, I got a couple of Fleet ships and that was because I liked them. I don't have the EC to buy all the neat little shinies on the Exchange, I got plenty of Dilithium, but I didn't use them until now because I'm something of a hoarder and I didn't want to spend everything right off.
I was one of the guys who ran into ISE with just very low-level gear I scavenged off of the Exchange and the like when I got my character to Level 50 and I was excited about a challenge when Delta Rising came out. You know what Delta Rising's release and my first Advanced fight told me?
Not that Cryptic are hacks like everyone and their mother is crying about. It told me I gotten complacent. I was happy with 3-5K. It was "enough". Now, it's not. I guess you can say it's comparable to when the crew of the Enterprise-D first met the Borg. We'd gotten a black eye and it was either time to man up or time to hide.
I'm looking forward to working out ways to make things better for me. I have plans to finally purchase a Nebula or even get a Fleet Nova like I've wanted for so long and learn new ways of handling things that isn't "HULK SMASH!"
I'm quite excited to see what I can do, even if it takes me another year or two to get to that level.
Lemme tell you something: I'm a casual. I only play an hour a day at least, mostly because I have the attention span of a gnat and other things need to keep my attention. I only started focusing on DPS stuff just before the expansion dropped. I don't have VR DOFFs that I gathered from other locations, I got a couple of Fleet ships and that was because I liked them. I don't have the EC to buy all the neat little shinies on the Exchange, I got plenty of Dilithium, but I didn't use them until now because I'm something of a hoarder and I didn't want to spend everything right off.
I was one of the guys who ran into ISE with just very low-level gear I scavenged off of the Exchange and the like when I got my character to Level 50 and I was excited about a challenge when Delta Rising came out. You know what Delta Rising's release and my first Advanced fight told me?
Not that Cryptic are hacks like everyone and their mother is crying about. It told me I gotten complacent. I was happy with 3-5K. It was "enough". Now, it's not. I guess you can say it's comparable to when the crew of the Enterprise-D first met the Borg. We'd gotten a black eye and it was either time to man up or time to hide.
I'm looking forward to working out ways to make things better for me. I have plans to finally purchase a Nebula or even get a Fleet Nova like I've wanted for so long and learn new ways of handling things that isn't "HULK SMASH!"
I'm quite excited to see what I can do, even if it takes me another year or two to get to that level.
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
Ladies and gentle-Vulcans, I present to you.....A REAL, LIVE CASUAL PLAYER!
You, sir, get this Romulan Ale. *give chilled bottle*
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
Anyway, DR is definitely harder. So far, I've only done the first mission with Tuvok and at first, I was having no issues whatsoever. Then I got to the end with the big ship (I'm not mentioning specifics just in case of spoilers).
That thing owned me. I had to adjust my tactics to beat it.
I'm not concerned with DPS numbers or anything like that. In fact, I couldn't even tell you what my DPS is. I play the game to have fun, not to see how high I can make the numbers go.
So far, I'm enjoying DR. I like the added challenge
Overall, I like the expansion. There are some things that I would like see modified but, if not, I'll adjust.
As for the PVE stuff? My adjustment has been made, I no longer do them. <<shrugs>>
Sarah Knightly - Co-leader; Frontier Explorers - U.S.S. Witchblade
Rias Gremory - Leader; Frontier Marauders - I.K.S. B'ullwinkle
Upgrading fleet Mk 10 to Mk 12 costs less than buying mk12.
No need to upgrade fleet holdings except for ships
Daily reputation bonus marks make a normal queue reward more than old elite before the daily box.
Daily/hourly rep projects give mk12 purple gear and BNP/voth implant/etc for free
Rep project sponsorship tokens halve cost for alts
Reputation removed random nature of queue reward system
Event ships of fleet quality
Event ships for one day effort after the first is unlocked
Event ships get free upgrade to t5ufleet status
Lockbox/lobi gear unbound
Lobi give away events
Annual item giveaway events, about $100us each time
All missions scale to level, never go "grey"
Replay favorite content at will
Sidekick to join friends of different power/experience
Good set items added to mission rewards, no dil/zen/$ needed
Foundry, and foundry dil reward system
Free purple doffs built into system (explore, exp tier 4, etc)
Delta didn't take any of that away, and added a few. As a casual, I find the expansion a success except for HP scaling in solo missions.
So instead of new "real" content they just recycled what was there by making it harder and REDUCING rewards. This is why they are going to lose people and why there is a good chance this game could fail. Lets not forget City of Heroes and how it was just gone one day. I do like this game and I support it, I spent over 200 bucks to prepare for DR and feel all I got was a big middle finger. Upgrading even from XIII to XIV is going to cost a fortune, and that will be so the STFs are somewhat playable again. Im all for the game making money, but to do it at the cost of our enjoyment is awful. So dont appreciate being abused and taken advantage of, fight back. Those of us who pay for content need to be heard, we arent complacent we are enjoying. You want harder, go to the harder difficulty, we want to enjoy the game not feel like its a second job and mortgage.
I think this sums up my own stance. Until I'm reasonably certain that I'm not going to be anything other than a liability, I'm sticking to normals - and only doing those for the XP, too.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
City of Heroes wasn't "gone one day". NCsoft sutset the game to force a new Korean grind MMO that thnkfully never reached made it out here and are now looking to sell the IP (after two years of being jerks and sitting on it with no intention of using it) to a new company.
Don't talk about CoX unless you were actually there and understood what happened to such a great game. It was killed by boneheaded publishers trying to make a TRIBBLE game the new cool, not for changing difficulty.
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
I played from beta, and you clearly forget the same day announcement and shutdown.
My point is, this game could go like that, you alienate your largest base, your product dies.
Wrong again. The sunset was announced two months prior to the shutdown. We spent the final month running the Summer Blockbuster event and a world boss rally across all servers leading up to the sutset. It was not a same day shutdown. CoX went gracefully, albeit unjustified. CoX did NOT alienate it's playerbase. It remained faithful to the core and helped inspire three "CoX Legacy" games that are currently under production. City of Titans, Heroes and Villains and Valiance Online. Paragon Studios tried their hardest to keep the IP, but NCsoft refused to sell and now Paragon is too scattered to return.
You don't know jack about CoX or what happened to it. I doubt you ever even played it if you think that's what happened.
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
The shutdown was announced on 31-Aug, and happened on 30-Nov, it wasn't a "same day" affair.
I have a feeling most everyone who posts here will in some way consider themselves a "casual player," so we can dispense with the formality of that part, right?
I haven't yet played the Delta missions yet, just b/c I've spent the past week or so spinning up a new character, and he's way the heck back in the story line (a Romulan, he just finished the arc on Nimbus). As for the new queue difficulty, I played one Klingon Fleet Alert where the starbase got overrun in the second wave b/c we were still trying to chew through these stupid HP bags.
My point of contention is that we were basically told, "New Advanced is like the old Elite," and that isn't even close to the case. I'm out of the queues for a while, until I get a better handle on what I can do with this content.
Generator
PS - Love the people whose response to this is to tell us all to nut up. /sarcasm Classy *and* helpful...
I'm sure your DPS is great, but as Kahless said, "a petaQ with high system mastery is still a petaQ." (Well, he should have said it...!)
For me, this is the closest thing to Star Trek I can get without watching reruns for the 42nd time... For me, it'll take years to get the gear that some of these people have right away. I purchased the LTS so that over time, I could accumulate enough zen to purchase a shiny here and there... I'm hoping the game is around for a while, so that when I do get those times when I can play (usually an hour a day, just like the OP), I can have a little fun for a long time to come...
I feel I have to run some of the Advanced and Elite sometimes because that's the only way I can grab the Borg whatchamacallits and the Voth Implant-thingies and Marks to move the Reps along and grab some of that gear. If they gave those devices for the normals, I'd play those...
CM
I still have my screenshot of my main holding a torch on the steps of city hall in atlas park 29.
/em holdtorch
/em sadface
I took my Arachnos Crab Spider Operative Reeves to Grandville. Stood under the Recluse statute with hundreds of other Arachanos Soldiers and Widows striking villain poses.
There will never be a villain more treacherous or evil as my Operative Reeves.
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
I managed to be MkXII or fleet almost across the board have a nice stockpile of dilithium.
I've beaten almost all the pre-DR Elite queues except for Hive ground and No Win Scenario, which I don't particularly want to try.
I'm not a DPS monster I'm just an engineer in an Assault Cruiser refit who can do decent. I can go in guns blazing or I can stick to the plan.
There was a point where I was running Crystalline Catastrophe Elite daily and not during the event. So when I queued up to advanced, which is supposed to be like the old Elite I thought it was gonna be another day in the office.
Umm...no. They increased the entity's health by a factor of 14. And it looks like they did the same to all the Tholians cruising around it. Even the Orb Weavers had 600K health. I'd died once, but not for anything exotic I got swarmed by Large Crystal Fragments when everything was on cooldown. And it was the only time I died while everyone was there. We knocked it down to 32% And then the Tholians swarmed again, and then they wouldn't die. And people started to leave and then the thing's health got back up to 40 and then down to 35, then back up to 40 and after half an hour we called it quits.
I'm not feeling it. Every average enemy ship having hp comparable to the final bosses of fleet actions before the expansion....it bears no logic. I"ve heard the same problem exists in the Fleet Actions.
If advanced is the old Elite, guys that could beat the Elite should still have a reasonable expectation of beating advanced. For the guys who want more challenge and more pain in their battles that's what the new Elite is supposed to be for. This "adjustment" is overkill. I'm of the mind of Cliff Blezinsky, the game should be hard, but beatable.
You shouldn't need to be hardcore for it to be beatable.
im all for a little more difficulty to the borg Stfs and fleet actions , but this is a HUGE creep in power displacement .
Shields low? Pop a shield heal, problem solved.
Attack run? hit my damage boosting skills all at once.
Honestly, i just want to play to have fun, not go up against challenges you have to be a min/maxer to pass in a cookie cutter build.
While i know those at the top of the game always want hard content but they are the minority, and a company doesn't make a profit catering to the minority. Bring back the fun Cryptic and you will likely make more than maxing difficulty for a small select few to enjoy.
This ^ so totally this.
- Give us back our old elite in the form of advanced so the majority are happy.
- keep the new elite for the hardcore base so they're happy.
- Improve the rewards across the board including adding all the rep specific rewards like the
borg Ones to the normal Queues as well as advanced and put the dilithium rewards to scale based on difficulty like this:
500 - Normal
1000 - Advanced
1500 - Elite
err and just fix the spheres from before DR seriously, invisible torpedo's and spheres doing more damage than cubes with more HP than cubes come on
do all that and everyone will be happy
The big thing I see from a new players perspective (and I think cryptic shot themselves in the foot for this) is there is no point in buying a current tier 5 ship when you can get a tier 6 ship cheaper and use it at the same levels.
Other then that there is a learning curve that has to be done because of the new content once everything is figured out on the players side it wont be so hard give it a couple months.
Yes it is close to the same experience as I have had with every other MMO i have played when new content comes out
Even thought I hadn't entered the Delta Rising areas yet. Since I hadn't logged on yet to really play. Only to collect daily Rep rewards and crafting then get back off. I plan on having fun with the game like I always have.
My Fed is ready for the new area. His gear isn't that great, but I upgrade what I could that didn't cost an arm/leg in the process. So he is going in with what he has. My KDF is still in the Dyson Rep. So he won't be ready yet. My Romulan is making great progress in the Romulan Rep. So she will have all kinds of gear.
Even playing only what time I have. You can still have fun and enjoy the game. At least I sure do and look forward to getting on. One good thing I'm glad I hadn't got into the new areas yet. Is to give them time to fix the glitches. Which isn't bad for me, since I still have my KDF and Romulan to work on. There is always something for me to do on the game.
The new stuff is great, but it will be a while before I purchase. As usual I will eventually get around to it.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
Regen Scrappers were nasty in PVP but my Necro/Dark MM was able to negate their regen and I killed almost every Regen Scrapper I fought. I miss that game so much.
Mr. Spock: And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty.
-Star Trek: Is There in Truth No Beauty? (1968)
Wow. Just. Wow. Not a DPS hound or dedicated min/max kinda guy by any means but I could usually hold my own and not be a burden or detriment. Until DR came out. Felt like I was throwing cotton candy at the Borg for all the good I was apparently doing. There were far more of them than I expected as well. Actually considered bailing I was doing so little to help out the other four players.
I like the idea of a challenge. But I firmly believe they've dialed it up a bit too far. Along with reducing the rewards to a laughable level. That much effort and time for a Dil reward very much smaller than I can earn DOFFing does not qualify as a quality investment of my admittedly limited free time. Won't be playing any of the revamped STFs again. Unless they can dial them back to about 85-90% of what they are now.
Also, with Netflix and two copies of Star Trek: Armada II, I do have alternate means of scratching my Star Trek itch.
I played CoH from it's closed beta too (in fact I was in the first group of 300 closed beta testers.) CoH was NOT shutdown the same day the sunset announcement was made. The sunset announcement was made in September of 2012. The game was shutdown on Novenber 30, 2012.
Want proof? (link)
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, while far from even LOOKING at optimal, was enough to pull my weight against a Borg cube (I've occasionally fought one of the ISE transformer cubes on my own) or survive (just barely, mind you - and it took everything out of my bag of tricks to do so) against half a dozen Voth ships in The Breach. (Also elite.) Thanks to its mobility, the ship I'm referring to was also a valuable asset in the latter map as it went and released all the captured Starfleet vessels. I'm actually using similar tactics in Borg Disconnected (I don't dare go into Advanced just yet, though), relying on a second player to distract the enemy for me.
What I'm trying to say is that one can run a stupidly undergeared ship and still make it work, but not in the new Advanced/Elite missions - ESPECIALLY not the Elite ones - and only if they know just what the heck they're trying to do with it in the first place.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
An that's working as intended, unfortunately. Elite is meant to be only for the minority. Advanced though is supposed to be for the majority. Where the devs and the players are in disagreement is when the majority are supposed to be ready.
The players seem to have though level 50 meant they were ready for a level 60 queue. The devs clearly don't. Butt nothing communicated this, and the game allowed unready players to try. The reward Nerf made everyone want to try.
To make the situation any worse would require actual malice, it is already very close to a worst case scenario.
I get where the devs are coming from, and what they're trying to do. They need (not want) to rein in power creep. The players should want this too, but like a bandaid, removal still stings. Problem is, devs are doing a poor job of it.
The new content absolutely needs as much power as players can throw at it so only hard core folks will do it as casuals like me will just not have the time to do it and so gradually we lose incentives to actually support the game as well. After all, what is the point of throwing money at something you can never keep up with?
A perfect example of this is The Secret World. I have a lifetime membership of that game but now never play it all and certainly never spend money on it. The reason is that I cannot spend enough time on it to be able to level a new weapon to the 'end game' levels in a reasonable amount of time. This means I cannot get access to later stages of the game, and the store is releasing expansions only for the later stages of the game.
The above is a perfect example of how a company policy can de-motivate a player from spending money by adding new content. Please can somebody at Cryptic realise that us more casual folks need to be able to have a feeling of progression or we will just move on and support other projects elsewhere. (Yes I know the equipment upgrade is supposed to partially allow casuals to progress, but the main stuff thats desired - rep gear - needs rewards that only comes from advanced and elite content)
Personally I am not likely to do that as I will probably just do the existing old-50 content for eternity with only occasional forays into the new content. Your DR development time is pretty much wasted on me as I just cannot grind enough to be able to enjoy it.
Still waiting to be able to use forum titles
I'm very much with you on this issue as I like to call myself a hardcore casual, if that makes any sense. I will go through periods of time where I"m hardcore in the game and there each and every day. Eventually, I hit a point where I don't do that, and I'm rarely in the game. So, I end up being a more carefree kind of player, but if I keep feeling that my contributions to the game are useless, I'm going to leave and probably not come back, even though I love it, have a lifetime membership to it, and quite often talk the game up and get others to play it as well.
For me, just running a simple fleet action should not be the Odyssey and the end all of all campaigns. It was a lot of fun the way it was with a whole lot of people contributing and doing what they could and having a whole lot of fun doing so. Now, I lose almost every match. I was in one last night (before the servers crashed and then were brought down for a patch) where we really felt like we were winning, and then we got the "you ran out of time and totally suck" message that said we basically failed the mission. These fleet actions are for people from very low levels all the way to the highest, but they're not playing that way any more. Instead, in order to beat a simple fleet action, you need an entire group that's both upgraded and well geared. And this is on NORMAL.
My fear is that if they don't fix this soon, people are going to just stop playing. Sure, the hard core nonstop players will stay, but the bread and butter of a free to play game is to attract both of them, not just one segment of the population, and right now they're driving away one major part of their demographic. That scares me because I really, really want this game to continue to do well for years to come.
Fleet Admiral Ventaxa Proxmire, U.S.S. Shaka Walls Fell
Blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/?page_id=1990
Foundry series: Bob From Accounting & For the Sake of the Empire