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STF's -- with all the issues in place , do you still play them ?
aelfwin1
Member Posts: 2,896 Arc User
My question is more related to player behavior then to our current issues , but at the same time it is our current issues that are at the core of my question .
So my question is two fold:
- Now that you can no longer get the same awards as before , nor can many of you play the missions themselves for half of the previous awards -- do you still play the STF's , and if you do, why ?
- I'm also curious as to how you substitute your time in the STF's, aside from playing the DR mission content, and what do you see yourself doing once you're done with DR ?
I myself have chosen to prolong DR as much as I can by not playing it's story content every day , and when I do play , its usually on Elite mode that is a bit tedious , but at least I don't burn through it .
As someone who usually plays STF's , I have decided not to play them now as I see that my attempts at playing them would only show up on Cryptic's metrics as a justification for their perverse handling of the STF's & HP's and awards in general , and I'm not willing to pat them on the back for a job well done .
So my question is two fold:
- Now that you can no longer get the same awards as before , nor can many of you play the missions themselves for half of the previous awards -- do you still play the STF's , and if you do, why ?
- I'm also curious as to how you substitute your time in the STF's, aside from playing the DR mission content, and what do you see yourself doing once you're done with DR ?
I myself have chosen to prolong DR as much as I can by not playing it's story content every day , and when I do play , its usually on Elite mode that is a bit tedious , but at least I don't burn through it .
As someone who usually plays STF's , I have decided not to play them now as I see that my attempts at playing them would only show up on Cryptic's metrics as a justification for their perverse handling of the STF's & HP's and awards in general , and I'm not willing to pat them on the back for a job well done .
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But the rewards are completely unsatisfactory for the time they take.
you have to be like the BORG...
...and ADAPT.
:cool:
"Where we are is the front."
Before DR I got about 130 marks from elite with daily bonus and optional. now I can get about 110 marks from normal. that 20 marks are not going to make me playing advanced.
and for dill - there is awesome dyson battle zone!
No more queues.
Since I'm doing the delta rep on 3 other alts, those ocassionaly play borg disconnected
There is also another alt that is at level 54 with which I do ISN as well, as the main.
My remaining toons are parked and I don't do anything with them except DOffing
Will not play queues
So nope... can't say that I will be using the STF's in the future... I would need to upgrade my ship, and I would need dil for that.
Of cause I can only spend about an hour pr day actually playing, so without access to the STF's, it should only take me 3-5 years to scrape enough dil for the Zen required.
Somehow this puzzles me, cause they said my ship would not become obsolete, so I am sure I am doing something wrong... I mean... Cryptic would not lie to us, right?
once i have done them i stop playing the game.
this will continue untill they have fixed the issue.
As im not even touching 2 of my alt as they need romulan marks and with the loss af azure i cant nor do i have time to do new romulas or sector space.
"It appears we have lost our sex appeal, captain."- Tuvok
I think the thing is, and as far as I'm aware, people still need to run on at least advanced to get the Neural Processors for the gear, so it'd be interesting to see how new players handle them as you can only get Mk XII for rep gear now, not like when we had Mk X and XI.
On the whole though I like them, though I've yet to pass judgement on the space ones, but if the space episode missions are anything to go by I imagine I could be a bit disappointed, simply because I don't consider extra HP's and heavier hits alone as a difficulty increase. More like a lack of imagination.
For the rest I don't do any stf's anymore. They take too long. The npc damage remains unchanged but it takes 20-30 mins to do an stf thanks to the boring massive heath pools. The rewards are definitely out of whack.
I can get 10x as much dilithium in the space undine/ground voth battlezones for that same amount of time.
As for my plans: This week the new Civilisation game is released. I plan to play that for the next few weeks, maybe even months until STO is fixed. There's so many bugs and issues alongside the really stupid changes to stf's. If they want to milk us, I wont let them do it to me, I'll be gone and re-evaluate this game in a few weeks.
sig
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It is a peculiar phenomenon that we can imagine events that defy the laws of the universe.
I don't have an issue running the new ones, I have always built tough, reliable ships with good damage, but the time/reward scale is way too lopsided and although I hate ground combat, and have only run the voth battle zone maybe twice since it was introduced and before DR, I am now back in the battle zone.
I don't really find it all that enjoyable, but I usually don't have much time to play and since i need TONS of dilithium to progress, its really the only way for me.
The issue I have with STFs post DR is not with the difficulty levels, it is with the halving of the previous awards for successful completion. If a player works more they should be rewarded with more. This premise served well with the previous iterations of the STFs. Suddenly the rewards for successful completion are half of what they used to be? So why should I as a player even bother with it? Why should I as a paying customer even bother with STO?
Don't nerf bat the NPCs in the STFs, just bring the rewards back to where they were prior to the release of DR. But of course this sounds entirely too much like common sense. However, the fine folks at pwe/cryptic are all waay smarter than us. Don't believe me? Just ask 'em, they'll tell you.
The metrics however, they will believe. This weekend I saw something I've not seen before in the two years I've been playing STO. The Queue numbers for 'Normal' anything were higher than the numbers for anything else. The Wait Times were a lot longer for all of the Queues as well. And they will only get longer as long as the rewards are out of whack with the effort required.
If Cryptic's goal was to get people back into the adventure zones, they've succeeded with me.
they are not lying, you just need to do what you said you need to do. if you dont have time to play the game, then you will need to pay for that dili. you wont and need, or you will simple quit the game as it seams you are not enjoying it any more.
Whatever grind they put in our faces we coped with it somehow . used its benefits but we did so in order to just get back to borg smashing.
After 2,5 years I played them on any terms imaginable. Good teams, bad teams, speed records, failures.. was all cool all fun and the best part my chars had plenty of dil after it on top of a good time.
With delta rising its all gone. The STF feel messed up. The addition of more NPCs or exchanging the existing ones was a cool, yet cheap, idea to make it more challenging. To tinker with the enemy hull hit points was not. They are messed up in either direction. Elite drones are too weak even to deserve the name and spheres annoyingly overpowered.
For me the revamp of the difficulty setting is a huge disappointment in multiple directions and when I read stuff like Hitpoint values @ Level 60 reduced to ~70% of current Holodeck values a week or so after a major release it makes me loose a lot of confidence in the dev group. This quick fix will probably make space tolerable again at best but at the price of ground which could become hilarious.
At the moment Im busy for the most part . doing gear upgrades levelling toons looking up new reput (in other words being bored). When I get back to the stuff I like to do and Cryptic hasnt found satisfactory solution on the Borg STF (they just broke a running system by the way, nothing more nothing less) Im pretty sure this will be my last disappointment in this game.
- Connor
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Exactly! I have stopped playing them as well. The difficulty changes incoming will not bring me back to them either until I see the rewards returned to a reasonable state.
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Answer to question one: Sometimes when I have no other choice, specifically because its one thing to level its another to be forced to grind grind grind just to continue the story.
So i just do the borg STF's for the exp.
Answer to the second question: well, if they fix the HP and shld TRIBBLE ups then okay sure id play consistantly get all my rep going on delta then move on to my kumari and scimi on my rom and fed tac (currently 57 on my eng ACR T5-U, which btw has turned into some sort of uber tank).
However for the moment until everything has been fixed I wont be played after wednesday as im subbing back to SWTOR. Until this mess is cleaned up, just a note I dont like swtor that much anymore however the fact is, its the only other MMO besides ESO and STO and ESO has its own Veteran rank problems atm so thats a no go.
I might of stuck around and waited had their been more PvE content, sadly though its sorely lacking in new content for PvE as far as expansions go its been lackluster and I actually was stupid enough to think it would out-do LoR *sigh*.
edit: I did hear from several people however that the devs supposedly didnt put all the content in to the expansion which confuses me a bit. But yeah I can honestly say this is NOT an expansion its an extension far too less content for an expansion.
Spending 20+ Min in one STF for 480 Dilitihium is a joke. Advanced is too easy to fail with PUG groups and even if you do succeed it feels like you get nothing for it.
How I substitute my time: I have been doing DR story content on 2 characters and spending a lot of time in the Undine Space Zone where I can still get a reasonable reward for my time investment.
I'm heavily relying on the upcoming Que Re balance to determine my future in STO. If the Ques offer a reward worth the time investment then I will have something to do. If things continue as they are then once I finish the story and get sick of the Undine Zone I'll be done with STO.
2 - I still need to get through the other main story missions before getting into DR content. This applies to all 5 toons.
I do various things to collect dil and I try to vary it a bit from day to day. This more or less means if I attempt to max out the refinement cap, the amount of time necessary varies day to day. The quickest would be my KDF toons due to the various Doff missions that rewards dil... and also contraband. However, it does take time flying around the sector blocks to search for Doff missions though so that does take time.
I will also start to devote less free time to STO because of real life and I will likely switch gears to play Alien Isolation...
At least Undine Infiltration Elite is quicker now since you do not have to wait for the force field to drop at the start and apparently there are no Undine trying to steal the Orb.
The thing is...people are actually communicating in chat. I've even been cross healed. We've planned out the mission and discussed strategy. I've even completed the optional. This is all in the pug queue and not in a STF channel.
Although the bump from normal to advanced is a bit much and messes up the learning curve, in general, I like that it's harder.
Also this allows for 2 gdfs which makes the DPS meter happy.
ELITE STF SPEED RECORDS (time on optional remaining):
S07: KASE: 12:54 | CSE: 13:20 | ISE: 12:38 All held personally, my POV
LOR: KASE: 13:19 | CSE: 13:47 | ISE: 13:34 None held personally, other player's POV
S08: coming soon
Yup, the illusion Cryptic gave of a T5.5 being competitive should qualify them for an Nebula award for best science fiction. Even the fleet upgraded ships are gimped without that new BOFF position or a T5 ship mastery trait. But look on the bright side, all the money they collected convincing players T5.5 ships could hang keeps the game alive, right ?
:cool:
To the topic- ya, I still play them. In fact I play only normals now since we can steamroll them in a couple of minutes. Leaves more time to farm dilith in the other missions. Heck, I even scrapped my T5.5 ship to make less of a faceroll in the normals.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
I think these are fine the way they are, This level of difficulty was always meant to be a Challenge! Even then if you have a decent team that knows what their doing it is still easy to complete them. I think the fact people are stopping playing because it's too difficult is hilarious. "We want nightmare mode!" Ok, one nightmare coming up, oh lets let them ease into it a bit by making people think in PvE. Lets revamp Advanced to be a decent stepping stone instead of the current faceroll.
Now the rewards do suck, I won't argue that at all. The rewards whold be seriously redone to make it worth the player while to go in and do them. If I ever encountered endgame content that gives so little as these do in any game I'd ignore them too, but lets be real...The only reason I bother is to have fun, kill some borg (funny to the right music) and maybe score some superior tech upgrades. There is nothing else in it for me.
I remember back before the first nerf (redo) of the stf's me and my fleet could 2 man these any day of the week in only an hour or so, and we did too on occasions just to see where we stood. Now there are people crying because their loosing on normal...*NORMAL*.
So again to answer the question, Yes, I plan to still play ALL the PvE content on advanced and enjoy the higher difficulty before they nerf it...AGAIN!
All my t5.5 ships are still kicking the TRIBBLE out of the advanced mode content and hanging in somtimes better then the t6.