As a point of reference, I DPS 10k+ pretty reliably, and I found some of the later DR patrol missions pretty Tedious.
I was actually really enjoying battles with the Vaadwaur early on... but then there just got to be sooo many of them.
^^This, I was wondering by the end just how many there were! I mean, 30 years and they had enough people to man fleets and then, having destroyed every ship available, there were still enough people for a further 5 waves of them... by that point it had ceased to be fun 10 missions ago and ceased to be funny 5 missions ago... by that point it was a mix of boring and sad...
THIS is what's ridiculous. If it takes you an hour to kill one small group of ships, even in the Delta Quadrant...you're doing it wrong. I'm no tac jockey with stacked consoles and cannon, either. Just an engineer with some Mk 12 beams and one torpedo launcher, and I'm not taking anywhere near that long to kill stuff. Is it slightly longer than we're used to in level 50, power-creep content? Sure, but, the difference is only a couple minutes, not an hour. Maybe that was an exaggeration on your part, but, if a couple minutes longer is too much for you...I'm not sure what to say.
The trouble is some of the enemies hp makes no sense. I went up against a carrier, and the pets that NPC carrier launches has the same or more health than my ship. I hovered my mouse over their icon and it showed they had 50k hp. I could understand them having say 20-30k as frigate pets but not that amount.
As others have said in the past higher hp does not equal more difficult but more tedious. Adding more skills to them that they can use makes a better choice. To say they can't is not correct they have done it on older NPCs, even if it is coded with a cooldown and they use it each time the cooldown is up, can make for a challange to deal with them.
You put that system in place a long time ago to help players run as a team and level. It is obvious you are changing directions in the game and this conflicts with that. Threatening players with "An Investigation" tells us you intend to seek out action against those players? Why not just fix the glitch and move on?
I will admit I ran the mission a few times. Queued events have less people running them due to some nasty bug issues. So when I saw people asking for help in Tau Dawa Japoli I said why not? After running it a few times I realized I jumped a few levels way too fast. If this means I am guilty then so be it. There was no rules against playing the game content the way you made it. I however was able to play the next mission I was grinding for. Thank you.
The way in which our community has reacted to this lockout, without knowledge of the details is quite sad.
Its an illustration of the degree to which we now trust cryptic. Which is to say we don't. There was a time when far more of us would have given them the benefit of the doubt.
The F2P development model has stripped them of most trust it seems. I also think it is valid as most mechanics introduced since PWE took over are not game enhancing at all sadly. Plus there are still issues from release not fixed yet! Sad really...
If you are looking for an excellent PvE fleet consider: Omega Combat Division today.
Former member of the Cryptic Family & FriendsTesting Team. Sadly, one day, it simply vanished - without a word or trace...
A single set of missions was circumventing something intended to be longer-term (ship mastery, specializations) in a way no other content in the game can even remotely match. This is out of line with the way the rest of the game behaves. Comparing these broken missions directly to missions that award XP as expected is imbecilic. Your hyperbole is also fallacy, as it is creating a false equivalence. "They're both content you play, there's no difference between an exploit and a mission working as intended!" is basically what you said, isn't it?
Don't get me wrong, Cryptic should have actually done testing on Tribble and caught this long before now and I don't think anyone should be punished, but to deny what we did was exploitative is at the very least dishonest.
While a single mission might be an issue you can't expect everyone to rush to the new content, especially when the forums explode with comments on exp breaks and hp misadjustments.
I stopped running storyline missions on my kdf/rom to handle the fleet but got to 50 anyway before DR. Once the cap lifted I resumed my missions starting with coliseum. Should I lose the few levels I gained by doing content that is available?
If they decide to roll back exp because some players were exploiting but others were not, should there not be outrage from the non-exploiters? An exploit in this way is the same reason Conduit Elite was often run. It was designed to be short, unlosable, and had the same cooldown as harder content with the same rewards. So no benefit for running other content, just grind the same mission over and over. People used to do the same things in Fleet alerts, Each wave won gave you marks, Bail after wave four or five I think and you can get back in with little difficulty. That is an exploit of the rules. You don't punish all players for this, you take a look and alter the rewards so it they have to finish the match to gain rewards.
If as other posters here have mentioned, this was something in testing and they left it there even after it was commented on. Then I have little sympathy as they could have closed the loophole at launch and no one would have been the wiser.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
Tedious is what PWE is all about, frankly I'm surprised all of this didn't happen in LoR.
I kinda feel sorry for Cryptic. I mean, they had a shot at the Star Trek IP, they bravely took it on, and made a decent enough job of it in a rush; it had flaws, but it also had potential. But in doing so they badly neglected Champions Online - a game with great potential and a huge initial uptake based on goodwill banked from City of Heroes - and lost a lot of goodwill.
So then they were stuck with 2 half-assed MMOs, so they didn't do as well as they had hoped.
So they had to have PWE take over.
Now PWE, like some virus, is basically turning their games into generic Asian grinders, and everybody's pointing and laughing.
Sad - from the innovative developers of one of the most beloved of earlier-generation MMOs (City of Heroes) to this ...
The history of Cryptic is the history of a company that makes MMOs with engaging combat/build systems, screwed by bad business leadership, leading to half-finished games that never fulfil the potential that everyone initially agrees they have.
The history of Cryptic is the history of a company that makes MMOs with engaging combat/build systems, screwed by bad business leadership, leading to half-finished games that never fulfil the potential that everyone initially agrees they have.
Sorry to say this, but you all who are complaining about this need to just forget about it. It's not going to change. Clearly this was a behavior Cryptic did not want, so they are addressing it. There is nothing any amount of complaining on the forums will do to change it.
With that said, I really don't blame anyone for this situation but Cryptic themselves. They release an unfinished product (again) with lengthy content gaps between story missions. Then they increase the difficulty on mobs in the DQ to make encounters more and more boring, tedious and time consuming. What did they expect? Any developer worth their salt would know players are going to take the path of least resistance to level. It's not like this is their first MMO. They've seen this behavior for years.
Everyone that has leveled their toon through anything other than the Delta Rising Episodes, gained skill points by killing NPC's other than the Vaadwaur, or generally played the game in any fashion as it was designed before Delta Rising is an exploiting scumbag and subject to punitive actions including bans, flogging, and an overall accusatory condescending attitude from the devs. You have been warned.
No. You're wrong. It wasn't just simply playing a patrol mission with friends and killing something else than Vaadwaur.
It was not possible to maintain the rapid pace that is likely considered "exploitive" if you didn't trick around a bit. You could legimately stumble upon it, but you needed a bit more than just assemble a PUG and play Tau Dewa Patrols on Elite to maintain that trick.
I leave it at that, because anything more would be against forum rules.
With that said, I really don't blame anyone for this situation but Cryptic themselves. They release an unfinished product (again) with lengthy content gaps between story missions.
The gap was intentional. It was not a good idea IMO, but they wanted that gap and have players not run through the content rapidly like all the previous tiers. it wasn't an oversight, it wasn't incomplete content. It was just a bad design goal (at least IMO), and people found a way around it.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
No. You're wrong. It wasn't just simply playing a patrol mission with friends and killing something else than Vaadwaur.
It was not possible to maintain the rapid pace that is likely considered "exploitive" if you didn't trick around a bit. You could legimately stumble upon it, but you needed a bit more than just assemble a PUG and play Tau Dewa Patrols on Elite to maintain that trick.
I leave it at that, because anything more would be against forum rules.
Then it's probably something strange, because what you described is what I was participating in. Just killing enemies with a team on elite, over and over.
Then it's probably something strange, because what you described is what I was participating in. Just killing enemies with a team on elite, over and over.
Now that I think about it.... Maybe you're correct.
I just realized that I encountered the issue in solo play, too. The Tau Dewa missions just don't scale to Level 60/Tier 6.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Originally Posted by gurugeorge
The history of Cryptic is the history of a company that makes MMOs with engaging combat/build systems, screwed by bad business leadership, leading to half-finished games that never fulfil the potential that everyone initially agrees they have.
Can I quote you on that?
Indeed you can, I think it says it all in a nutshell
Everyone that has leveled their toon through anything other than the Delta Rising Episodes, gained skill points by killing NPC's other than the Vaadwaur, or generally played the game in any fashion as it was designed before Delta Rising is an exploiting scumbag and subject to punitive actions including bans, flogging, and an overall accusatory condescending attitude from the devs. You have been warned.
A tad over the top, but your intent is recognized and acknowledged.
No. You're wrong. It wasn't just simply playing a patrol mission with friends and killing something else than Vaadwaur.
It was not possible to maintain the rapid pace that is likely considered "exploitive" if you didn't trick around a bit. You could legimately stumble upon it, but you needed a bit more than just assemble a PUG and play Tau Dewa Patrols on Elite to maintain that trick.
I leave it at that, because anything more would be against forum rules.
LOL there wasn't anything special going on. If you had a low level join a group (didn't need to be all 60's as the rest) then you would gain levels a little faster. However even an all 60 group was pulling a level every 3 runs (~15 mins round trip), with a lowbie it was happening in 2 runs (~10 mins round trip).
The gap was intentional. It was not a good idea IMO, but they wanted that gap and have players not run through the content rapidly like all the previous tiers. it wasn't an oversight, it wasn't incomplete content. It was just a bad design goal (at least IMO), and people found a way around it.
An exploit is where the game isn't being played as intended, which clearly wasn't the issue in Tau Dewa. People were playing the Daily missions in groups on Elite which just happened to bypass the boring grind of the DR missions. Sorry but you can bet a monkey's nuts that no-one wants to run Mindscape 19 times or go through Argala roughly the same to get a level, to just UNLOCK the ability to play the next bit of content.
Having played the DR content on Elite totally NOT the way the Dev's intended, with all missions in a row and skipping the sector patrols due to time constraints, I can say the missions when they work are pretty well polished and well voice acted. When they don't work they are the most frustrating and badly designed maps and enemy combinations I've seen ingame so far.
The worst being the mission where you come up against a Holographic Voth Bulwark for me. My ship was setup to defeat Vaadwaur and not die despite the stupid overhealth on the Vaadwaur/DR ships. However this Bulwark on it's own had 1.25Million HP, not counting it's shield which was about the same again. It took a full two hours to kill it after working out the method needed to survive long enough to do it. The final battle was 50+ mins of utter boredom of rinse and repeat. I was permanently at under 50% hull, continually repairing and getting thoroughly bored of trying to avoid it's feedback shield using Evasive Manoeuvres or RSP. 3 Fleet Supports later and it was dead, however it wasn't because my ship can't deal enough damage. It was primarily that the ship I was facing SOLO was fielding health a full 17x more than my Aehlal Battlecruiser which had 72500 HP.
I do around 14-16K DPS with this ship in the survival configuration I use for PUG's which should down it in around 83.3s with pure damage to hull no shield involved. However The Bulwark has a reflect shield and a second impenetrable shield which it can use every 2 mins. Not to mention that it has already got hull heals, shield heals and tactical team. If you get in it's forward 90 degrees it sticks out a grav well which combined with a Beam Overload from it's frontal DBB's equals insta-kill on a ship with Mk 12 Fleet Elite shields and 72.5K hull. The shield bleed through of the Overload was usually greater than 30K damage in a single hit.
I dread to think what that fight would have been like in my Phantom or my Galor, neither of which have the Valdore console or other life saving gear like my Rom main has. A Sci based ship such as the Dauntless or Vesta would rip it a new one with all the debuff's and control's, but this isn't a multi-man mission, it's a Solo job which leaves you up **** creek.
The funny thing is that the final mission which has 5 waves to defeat in different circumstances were easier (if almost as slow) due to the lack of OP Voth hanging about. No mission should take 2hrs with the pittance that current missions give as rewards. The rewards from Tau Dewa Grinding were about right for the time invested. Not a huge amount of sellable gear, even less usable gear, the odd R&D drop and some fun to boot, something that none of the DR missions really gave.
Storyline ended up pretty good on Kobali when it wasn't interupted by the level grind. Same with the overriding DR storyline which felt far more cohesive without the breaks for hours to get to the next 5 mins of story. Pacing is an art, PWE/Cryptic need to hire some artists...
Chris Robert's on SC:
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
Jeebus, are you all clueless on how the game works? The exploit wasn't running the patrols on elite. The exploit was using a 60 with a lower level toon...like say a 50 and level matching to them to get STUPID silly high exp. Like you can level up 6 or more times in an hour high if your doing ths right. Not that I agree with them tacking this before other issue mind you...but there actually was an exploit...a REAL one...albiet one that doesn't matter that much due to refine time gate.
Well then make them scale to highest team level, not nerf the entire god damn thing, and honestly if I was a dev I could care less how soon people get their spec points and mastery and stuff. Its not that big of a deal.
You can have your milk and cookies, but drinking milk with cookies is considered "exploiting" and we don't want you to "exploit" your milk and cookies do we ?
This just in! Due to the exploitive behavior of a few Cryptic has decided to reset all players back to lvl 1! But they assure us, this isn't a bad thing! We get to play all of our favorite missions over again and by the time we reach the Delta quadrant, there will surely be eve newer content to enjoy!
It's hyperbole, not fallacy. They called doing Patrol missions in Tau Dewa exploitative. These are missions designed and put in the game by the devs. Hence, playing the game as it was designed is now considered exploitative and you all should be ashamed for playing STO.
No, no, and naaaaaah.
We'll keep playing. You don't have to if you don't want to. But if you refuse to understand what's what, don't get confused when other people don't get banned or rolled back for doing something totally unrelated to the current situation.
While a single mission might be an issue you can't expect everyone to rush to the new content, especially when the forums explode with comments on exp breaks and hp misadjustments.
No. I expect people logout and not play or level through the Duty Officer system. And complain about slow progress.
It's like this:
You have a vending machine where the price is too high.
I absolutely expect people not to buy at a reasonable rate and the vending machine company to go out of business or adjust.
I absolutely don't expect people to spread a code on how to get free things from the vending machine, nor do I expect that to go without consequence.
I have a problem with that.
The single biggest problem I have with Cryptic is that they've become uncommunicative and admitted upfront that they aren't using the forums or testing as a significant source of feedback.
Cryptic didn't light the match that started the fire here. They doused themselves in gasoline, definitely, and I'm all for calling that out and calling management out on that.
I think we have to be very clear in terms of how we express criticism here. It is not Cryptic's fault that players exploited the system. But they weren't helping any by putting internal goals ahead of customer feedback either and this made the problem worse and it made players more likely to exploit and will continue to proliferate exploiting.
The exploiting needs to stop. Cryptic needs to take a step back from their goals. Both things need to happen, not just one or the other.
Back to playing World of Tanks which is actually designed to be a fun game and fair to players.
Excuse me sir, yes, you. Is getting one shotted by Arties sitting on the other end of the map fun? Is the RNG that's so insanely wild that your can do anywhere from 20-1000 dmg while aiming at the same spot and not even moving fun?
World of Tanks PvP is way better than STO PvP of course, but the grind is huge to get to the higher tiers and the arties and RNG really killed it(not in the good way) IMO.
The devs' error here is a communications and community relations one.
Describing the actions taken by players in the Tau Dewa sector as exploitative is a faux pas.
Loose use of the word "exploit" is disrespectful of players.
They didn't even say that everyone's actions in Tau Dewa was exploitative. They said some plyaers' actions were. I think it's problematic that every player who ground a patrol seems to assume that they were the ones being talked about when, from what I see, it was very specific and very unusual, deliberate actions that resulted in some players seeing massive gains, even beyond what the typical Elite Patrol grinder would have seen.
Comments
^^This, I was wondering by the end just how many there were! I mean, 30 years and they had enough people to man fleets and then, having destroyed every ship available, there were still enough people for a further 5 waves of them... by that point it had ceased to be fun 10 missions ago and ceased to be funny 5 missions ago... by that point it was a mix of boring and sad...
Right there with you. My FT5-U Gal-X does 13k+ solo pretty well. It gets really tedious to the point I dread doing space combat in DR anymore.
I find myself say 'Oh COME ON, aren't you dead yet?! There's another wave?! TRIBBLE this.' quite a lot to my screen.
The trouble is some of the enemies hp makes no sense. I went up against a carrier, and the pets that NPC carrier launches has the same or more health than my ship. I hovered my mouse over their icon and it showed they had 50k hp. I could understand them having say 20-30k as frigate pets but not that amount.
As others have said in the past higher hp does not equal more difficult but more tedious. Adding more skills to them that they can use makes a better choice. To say they can't is not correct they have done it on older NPCs, even if it is coded with a cooldown and they use it each time the cooldown is up, can make for a challange to deal with them.
I will admit I ran the mission a few times. Queued events have less people running them due to some nasty bug issues. So when I saw people asking for help in Tau Dawa Japoli I said why not? After running it a few times I realized I jumped a few levels way too fast. If this means I am guilty then so be it. There was no rules against playing the game content the way you made it. I however was able to play the next mission I was grinding for. Thank you.
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ingame: @.Spartan
Original Cryptic Forum Name: Spartan (member #124)
The Glorious, Kirk’s Protegè
idiots.
While a single mission might be an issue you can't expect everyone to rush to the new content, especially when the forums explode with comments on exp breaks and hp misadjustments.
I stopped running storyline missions on my kdf/rom to handle the fleet but got to 50 anyway before DR. Once the cap lifted I resumed my missions starting with coliseum. Should I lose the few levels I gained by doing content that is available?
If they decide to roll back exp because some players were exploiting but others were not, should there not be outrage from the non-exploiters? An exploit in this way is the same reason Conduit Elite was often run. It was designed to be short, unlosable, and had the same cooldown as harder content with the same rewards. So no benefit for running other content, just grind the same mission over and over. People used to do the same things in Fleet alerts, Each wave won gave you marks, Bail after wave four or five I think and you can get back in with little difficulty. That is an exploit of the rules. You don't punish all players for this, you take a look and alter the rewards so it they have to finish the match to gain rewards.
If as other posters here have mentioned, this was something in testing and they left it there even after it was commented on. Then I have little sympathy as they could have closed the loophole at launch and no one would have been the wiser.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
I kinda feel sorry for Cryptic. I mean, they had a shot at the Star Trek IP, they bravely took it on, and made a decent enough job of it in a rush; it had flaws, but it also had potential. But in doing so they badly neglected Champions Online - a game with great potential and a huge initial uptake based on goodwill banked from City of Heroes - and lost a lot of goodwill.
So then they were stuck with 2 half-assed MMOs, so they didn't do as well as they had hoped.
So they had to have PWE take over.
Now PWE, like some virus, is basically turning their games into generic Asian grinders, and everybody's pointing and laughing.
Sad - from the innovative developers of one of the most beloved of earlier-generation MMOs (City of Heroes) to this ...
The history of Cryptic is the history of a company that makes MMOs with engaging combat/build systems, screwed by bad business leadership, leading to half-finished games that never fulfil the potential that everyone initially agrees they have.
Can I quote you on that?
+1 Sadly all very very true.
No. You're wrong. It wasn't just simply playing a patrol mission with friends and killing something else than Vaadwaur.
It was not possible to maintain the rapid pace that is likely considered "exploitive" if you didn't trick around a bit. You could legimately stumble upon it, but you needed a bit more than just assemble a PUG and play Tau Dewa Patrols on Elite to maintain that trick.
I leave it at that, because anything more would be against forum rules.
The gap was intentional. It was not a good idea IMO, but they wanted that gap and have players not run through the content rapidly like all the previous tiers. it wasn't an oversight, it wasn't incomplete content. It was just a bad design goal (at least IMO), and people found a way around it.
Then it's probably something strange, because what you described is what I was participating in. Just killing enemies with a team on elite, over and over.
I just realized that I encountered the issue in solo play, too. The Tau Dewa missions just don't scale to Level 60/Tier 6.
not sure if that's sad or lame
Our fleet felt the same way it was the most fun we had in a long.
Only thing that came close was PRE - DR STF's
Indeed you can, I think it says it all in a nutshell
A tad over the top, but your intent is recognized and acknowledged.
An exploit is where the game isn't being played as intended, which clearly wasn't the issue in Tau Dewa. People were playing the Daily missions in groups on Elite which just happened to bypass the boring grind of the DR missions. Sorry but you can bet a monkey's nuts that no-one wants to run Mindscape 19 times or go through Argala roughly the same to get a level, to just UNLOCK the ability to play the next bit of content.
Having played the DR content on Elite totally NOT the way the Dev's intended, with all missions in a row and skipping the sector patrols due to time constraints, I can say the missions when they work are pretty well polished and well voice acted. When they don't work they are the most frustrating and badly designed maps and enemy combinations I've seen ingame so far.
The worst being the mission where you come up against a Holographic Voth Bulwark for me. My ship was setup to defeat Vaadwaur and not die despite the stupid overhealth on the Vaadwaur/DR ships. However this Bulwark on it's own had 1.25Million HP, not counting it's shield which was about the same again. It took a full two hours to kill it after working out the method needed to survive long enough to do it. The final battle was 50+ mins of utter boredom of rinse and repeat. I was permanently at under 50% hull, continually repairing and getting thoroughly bored of trying to avoid it's feedback shield using Evasive Manoeuvres or RSP. 3 Fleet Supports later and it was dead, however it wasn't because my ship can't deal enough damage. It was primarily that the ship I was facing SOLO was fielding health a full 17x more than my Aehlal Battlecruiser which had 72500 HP.
I do around 14-16K DPS with this ship in the survival configuration I use for PUG's which should down it in around 83.3s with pure damage to hull no shield involved. However The Bulwark has a reflect shield and a second impenetrable shield which it can use every 2 mins. Not to mention that it has already got hull heals, shield heals and tactical team. If you get in it's forward 90 degrees it sticks out a grav well which combined with a Beam Overload from it's frontal DBB's equals insta-kill on a ship with Mk 12 Fleet Elite shields and 72.5K hull. The shield bleed through of the Overload was usually greater than 30K damage in a single hit.
I dread to think what that fight would have been like in my Phantom or my Galor, neither of which have the Valdore console or other life saving gear like my Rom main has. A Sci based ship such as the Dauntless or Vesta would rip it a new one with all the debuff's and control's, but this isn't a multi-man mission, it's a Solo job which leaves you up **** creek.
The funny thing is that the final mission which has 5 waves to defeat in different circumstances were easier (if almost as slow) due to the lack of OP Voth hanging about. No mission should take 2hrs with the pittance that current missions give as rewards. The rewards from Tau Dewa Grinding were about right for the time invested. Not a huge amount of sellable gear, even less usable gear, the odd R&D drop and some fun to boot, something that none of the DR missions really gave.
Storyline ended up pretty good on Kobali when it wasn't interupted by the level grind. Same with the overriding DR storyline which felt far more cohesive without the breaks for hours to get to the next 5 mins of story. Pacing is an art, PWE/Cryptic need to hire some artists...
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
Its was better then punching DR hit point bags in STFs.
I think the DR fun is over.
Back to playing World of Tanks which is actually designed to be a fun game and fair to players.
Do not have permission to access.
We'll keep playing. You don't have to if you don't want to. But if you refuse to understand what's what, don't get confused when other people don't get banned or rolled back for doing something totally unrelated to the current situation.
Haters gonna hate. :cool:
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No. I expect people logout and not play or level through the Duty Officer system. And complain about slow progress.
It's like this:
You have a vending machine where the price is too high.
I absolutely expect people not to buy at a reasonable rate and the vending machine company to go out of business or adjust.
I absolutely don't expect people to spread a code on how to get free things from the vending machine, nor do I expect that to go without consequence.
I have a problem with that.
The single biggest problem I have with Cryptic is that they've become uncommunicative and admitted upfront that they aren't using the forums or testing as a significant source of feedback.
Cryptic didn't light the match that started the fire here. They doused themselves in gasoline, definitely, and I'm all for calling that out and calling management out on that.
I think we have to be very clear in terms of how we express criticism here. It is not Cryptic's fault that players exploited the system. But they weren't helping any by putting internal goals ahead of customer feedback either and this made the problem worse and it made players more likely to exploit and will continue to proliferate exploiting.
The exploiting needs to stop. Cryptic needs to take a step back from their goals. Both things need to happen, not just one or the other.
Excuse me sir, yes, you. Is getting one shotted by Arties sitting on the other end of the map fun? Is the RNG that's so insanely wild that your can do anywhere from 20-1000 dmg while aiming at the same spot and not even moving fun?
World of Tanks PvP is way better than STO PvP of course, but the grind is huge to get to the higher tiers and the arties and RNG really killed it(not in the good way) IMO.
The devs' error here is a communications and community relations one.
Describing the actions taken by players in the Tau Dewa sector as exploitative is a faux pas.
Loose use of the word "exploit" is disrespectful of players.
They didn't even say that everyone's actions in Tau Dewa was exploitative. They said some plyaers' actions were. I think it's problematic that every player who ground a patrol seems to assume that they were the ones being talked about when, from what I see, it was very specific and very unusual, deliberate actions that resulted in some players seeing massive gains, even beyond what the typical Elite Patrol grinder would have seen.