Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Speak with your wallets. I was considering getting the delta pack, but after hearing that people that were grinding outside of tau dewa and had their levels rolled back... That's a deal breaker for me. I have spent a fair amount of money on this game as well. If they turn around their policies, I would consider buying again, but as it stands I don't know that the STO community can stand more f-ups like this.
Dear devs, give me a reason to be confident about spending on this game, right now I am very uneasy...
They appear by my calculations to have made a coding error--a major one, but substituting a divide for the intended multiply operator produces a 72% loss of XP.
I hate to say it (and I admire your optimism), but I don't think this was an error.
Yes, I know in the release notes they said they were scaling 2 times the SP from XP where in the past it was 1.75. But here's the kicker, they can up your ratio of SP:XP all they want. It won't do anything if they just nerf the XP anyway (note there's no real mention of this except in vague terms about mobs giving and scaling the correct amount of XP).
You will find that the best option for grinding levels now will be by repeating DR content or do a super-dooper power grind on DQ patrols.
This loss of XP is intentional. Also add to the fact that for everyone who made lvl60, they seem to have recalculated your XP on the new values and applied that amount of XP to your char, resulting in a lot of people losing spec talents.
I've said it before; they can't have you skipping the grind. The spec trees are supposed to take weeks if not months to complete. It's the only thing that will take your mind off the fact that there is only about 15-18 hours of unique gameplay in this release.
Do yourselves a favour and forget about the spec trees. Don't even think about them and do everything else as you did before (episodes/reputation gear). You'll find that you'll be out of things to do very soon without it becoming a repetitive grind .
Well, it was fun for a little while, back to Logging in, Doffing and loggin out.
That is the last time I pay for one of this RIDICULOUS expansion packs.
Just ran that through Google translate and this is what came back :
"The players weren't playing the game in the way that PWE\Cryptic wanted. To fix this problem we've sucked the last possible remaining bits of enjoyment out the game. Now players should be much more focused on the activities PWE\Cryptic find acceptable, namely grinding away for almost zero reward and opening their wallets to avoid the grinding."
I have to agree wholeheartedly. As a player of over three years, with thousands invested in this game...having worked my nacelles off earning gear, now it's all essentially obsolete...unless, for the low, low price of 1,423,628 zen, I want to invest even more.
What's more, just as the reputation system punished players with multiple characters...people that actually enjoy variety in gaming...those same people have now been kicked when they're down. Throw a bone with sponsorship tokens, but then turn around and nerf the TRIBBLE out of skill points for everything under the sun.
At this rate, it's just not feasible to run different characters...yet that's one element that's kept me in the game. Now variety just means I can only run limited missions because of gear restrictions.
Finally, you're now doing what WoW did to their player base years ago...you've created end-game content that only a few "elite" can actually complete. There are chat channels for 10k, 20k, 30k DPS players...members only clubs where the elite stick with the elite because they can afford to game 20 hours per day to grind out all this TRIBBLE. Literally millions left that game because of this same problem.
Goals MUST BE ATTAINABLE IN A GAME, OR IT CEASES TO BE FUN...which is the point of gaming...isn't it?
Leveling has now become the impossible dream, and nerfing previously excellent MK XII gear by virtue of missions that need 14 epic to complete successfully is a slap in the face to people who've stuck with the game for years.
As I said yesterday, for the love of Gene Roddenberry, PLEASE LISTEN TO YOUR PLAYER BASE, not just the few elitists that think the game is fine so long as they've got theirs.
Baldemort, K'Bald E Mort, D'Baldemort Twelve toons, one mission...enjoy STO House of DILLIGAF (KDF)
Oh come on, its not like there's no XP sources available. I mean you look at the numbers that moved to farming Argala instead of Japori, there's still plenty out there.
Oh come on, its not like there's no XP sources available. I mean you look at the numbers that moved to farming Argala instead of Japori, there's still plenty out there.
The last patch nerfed Argala too. Now you only get 300 (ish) XP for an elite ship kill there, meaning it'll take in the region of 200 ship kills to get a single specialization point.
Oh come on, its not like there's no XP sources available. I mean you look at the numbers that moved to farming Argala instead of Japori, there's still plenty out there.
Have you actually looked at the difference in SP awarded since yesterday's "patch?" It's about 1/3 of what it was. That means three times longer for each level for those that didn't play 20+ hours a day for the first week of Delta Rising. Longer times means more hours of endless and repetitive grinding.
If you've only got one or two characters, that may not be horrendous, but a lot of us have a lot of characters because, once upon a time, the game was fun to have some variety with. Once you're running 6-10 characters, a mix in all factions, and then begin to realize the impossibility of most of those characters being effective in end-game content...it's more than a little frustrating. We've spent time, money and resources gaining ships, gear and leveling...only to be told...oops, too bad, now you've got a bunch of paperweight toons that can't really play much of anything anymore.
Baldemort, K'Bald E Mort, D'Baldemort Twelve toons, one mission...enjoy STO House of DILLIGAF (KDF)
Much needed fix, this is appreciated by everyone not exploiting their way to 60 and max specilization. The game is probably better off without most of the people who ragequit after losing max specialization like those dps channel exploiters.
Much needed fix, this is appreciated by everyone not exploiting their way to 60 and max specilization. The game is probably better off without most of the people who ragequit after losing max specialization like those dps channel exploiters.
Much needed fix, this is appreciated by everyone not exploiting their way to 60 and max specilization. The game is probably better off without most of the people who ragequit after losing max specialization like those dps channel exploiters.
Marc, the problem is that it also blanket punishes those of us who've never exploited, and it's inconsistent. UP UNTIL you reach Lvl 50 on a character, the SP is the same as it was before...this is for DOFF missions, episodes, etc. ONCE YOU REACH 50, you hit the brick wall of SP nerf...and the values are approximately 1/3 what they used to be.
I'm not upset about correcting exploits...I dislike them as much as you do. What I don't appreciate is the changing of long-standing mechanics to throttle the progress of players. It's no different than cell phone companies that throttle "unlimited" data after a certain allowance...it's a bait and switch.
Baldemort, K'Bald E Mort, D'Baldemort Twelve toons, one mission...enjoy STO House of DILLIGAF (KDF)
I run 10 characters, no problems leveling any of them here, nor do I see amy problems down the road. I have also had no problems whatever progressing through the new or old content using the same exact gear my alts have been using all along. If you actually believe what you posted then I just have to say... HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA.
I guess you don't understand the difference between "had" & "have"
Patch Notes : Resolved an Issue, where people would accidently experience Fun.
I never lost any points after the "fix", but disagree with all the toys around Cryptics pram....
So to show you I play the game how I want... Welcome to OCCUPY ESD...
My character will be sat on the floor not playing as a protest.... Join me to show your support
i'd like to mention that all your actions will accomplish is boost cryptic's activity metrics.
even if all you do is sit still, you're still online, so you're supporting them and their "ingame players" stats.
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.
i'd like to mention that all your actions will accomplish is boost cryptic's activity metrics.
Dare I say this,
Ah TRIBBLE it, Cryptic have made their bed. Actually, if enough people do the same thing at the same time in the same location, it could cause problems.
Cryptics PR/CS machine is designed to "divide and conquer" the playerbase. However, if the playerbase organised, it would cause them problems.
How does that accomplish anything to go to one place when the server just spins off new instances? At least as I understand it I don't think STO's setup would ever make something like the Jita Riots doable here.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Client side crashes are unimportant. Server side crashes cause lots of problems and we know that the STO engine is old and all they can do is patch it.
"While many players participated a little in the exploited maps, very few really took advantage of it to excessively level characters. We identified this small number of players, and we have removed the excess levels from these characters."
You took roughly 300,000 XP from me. And yet, I was nowhere near Tau Dewa, nor did engage in any team leveling up; nor have I been grouping with anyone (outside of PUGs). I *have* been doing a 'Shutdown' mission, near DS9, but did NOT, at any time, team-grind said mission, nor otherwise used team-trickery, or anything else, to take advtantage of NPC's with their level lowered. Solo-ed only. You have your logs to back this up.
Essentially, you are saying repeating an age-old story mission, over and over again, solo, on Elite, is 'exploitative.' I submit to you that doing so is the very definition of grinding!
Also, I find your punishment excessive, disproportionate, and, most of all, absolutely uncalled for. You could have sufficed saying something to the public like "Gee, we really didn't mean for you to solo that mission over and over again, and had kinda hoped you would play more DR content." But me solo-ing that mission did not, in any way, shape, or form, justify stealing 300,000 of my well-earned skillpoints.
So, I'd like my XP back, as I did *not* engage in any exploitative behavior.
Client side crashes are unimportant. Server side crashes cause lots of problems and we know that the STO engine is old and all they can do is patch it.
nothing like trying to make yourself look good after you made a goof huh, well done good job etc etc.
To be fair though i would have done the same thing and hoped no one would spot the change
just so those who are new to this topic are wondering what the hell some of us are talking about, the original start of this thread was as follows
Hey everyone!
The development team became recently aware of a potential exploit with Tau Dewa and after initial investigation decided to shut down access to the maps that were being used by the exploiters in order for the team to perform a deeper investigation.
We uncovered some bugs in the game that were being used by a very select few players for exploitation. Fixes to these bugs have gone live today that should remove the exploit. Details of the changes can be found in the release notes.
A lot of players were on the maps, but very few people took advantage of this. We have identified this extremely small number of players have taken appropriate action.
I really apologize for the inconvenience of closed maps during the investigation and for the bugs that led to the scramble around those maps. The team was focused on it, and due to the nature of the exploit, I did not want to discuss the details heavily. Now that everything is fixed, I wanted to let everyone know a little more about what was going on.
~LaughingTrendy
Fixed that for you LaughingTrendy, did not want anyone confused
"While many players participated a little in the exploited maps, very few really took advantage of it to excessively level characters. We identified this small number of players, and we have removed the excess levels from these characters."
You took roughly 300,000 XP from me. And yet, I was nowhere near Tau Dewa, nor did engage in any team leveling up; nor have I been grouping with anyone (outside of PUGs). I *have* been doing a 'Shutdown' mission, near DS9, but did NOT, at any time, team-grind said mission, nor otherwise used team-trickery, or anything else, to take advtantage of NPC's with their level lowered. Solo-ed only. You have your logs to back this up.
Essentially, you are saying repeating an age-old story mission, over and over again, solo, on Elite, is 'exploitative.' I submit to you that doing so is the very definition of grinding!
Also, I find your punishment excessive, disproportionate, and, most of all, absolutely uncalled for. You could have sufficed saying something to the public like "Gee, we really didn't mean for you to solo that mission over and over again, and had kinda hoped you would play more DR content." But me solo-ing that mission did not, in any way, shape, or form, justify stealing 300,000 of my well-earned skillpoints.
So, I'd like my XP back, as I did *not* engage in any exploitative behavior.
Crossing fingers and hoping this post by trendy means you and others get points back:
Comments
Is it group hug time yet?
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Dear devs, give me a reason to be confident about spending on this game, right now I am very uneasy...
Yes, I know in the release notes they said they were scaling 2 times the SP from XP where in the past it was 1.75. But here's the kicker, they can up your ratio of SP:XP all they want. It won't do anything if they just nerf the XP anyway (note there's no real mention of this except in vague terms about mobs giving and scaling the correct amount of XP).
You will find that the best option for grinding levels now will be by repeating DR content or do a super-dooper power grind on DQ patrols.
This loss of XP is intentional. Also add to the fact that for everyone who made lvl60, they seem to have recalculated your XP on the new values and applied that amount of XP to your char, resulting in a lot of people losing spec talents.
I've said it before; they can't have you skipping the grind. The spec trees are supposed to take weeks if not months to complete. It's the only thing that will take your mind off the fact that there is only about 15-18 hours of unique gameplay in this release.
Do yourselves a favour and forget about the spec trees. Don't even think about them and do everything else as you did before (episodes/reputation gear). You'll find that you'll be out of things to do very soon without it becoming a repetitive grind
Cheers!
Then can I be the snowflake? I love cold to the point that I ran a 5K on a (snowy) December 21st on a bet in my Speedo.
On another note, gulberat, you really deserve to be Cryptic's PR guy. They need you. Badly. At any price.
That is the last time I pay for one of this RIDICULOUS expansion packs.
I have to agree wholeheartedly. As a player of over three years, with thousands invested in this game...having worked my nacelles off earning gear, now it's all essentially obsolete...unless, for the low, low price of 1,423,628 zen, I want to invest even more.
What's more, just as the reputation system punished players with multiple characters...people that actually enjoy variety in gaming...those same people have now been kicked when they're down. Throw a bone with sponsorship tokens, but then turn around and nerf the TRIBBLE out of skill points for everything under the sun.
At this rate, it's just not feasible to run different characters...yet that's one element that's kept me in the game. Now variety just means I can only run limited missions because of gear restrictions.
Finally, you're now doing what WoW did to their player base years ago...you've created end-game content that only a few "elite" can actually complete. There are chat channels for 10k, 20k, 30k DPS players...members only clubs where the elite stick with the elite because they can afford to game 20 hours per day to grind out all this TRIBBLE. Literally millions left that game because of this same problem.
Goals MUST BE ATTAINABLE IN A GAME, OR IT CEASES TO BE FUN...which is the point of gaming...isn't it?
Leveling has now become the impossible dream, and nerfing previously excellent MK XII gear by virtue of missions that need 14 epic to complete successfully is a slap in the face to people who've stuck with the game for years.
As I said yesterday, for the love of Gene Roddenberry, PLEASE LISTEN TO YOUR PLAYER BASE, not just the few elitists that think the game is fine so long as they've got theirs.
Twelve toons, one mission...enjoy STO
House of DILLIGAF (KDF)
The last patch nerfed Argala too. Now you only get 300 (ish) XP for an elite ship kill there, meaning it'll take in the region of 200 ship kills to get a single specialization point.
Who the hell has the time to do that?
Free Tibet!
Have you actually looked at the difference in SP awarded since yesterday's "patch?" It's about 1/3 of what it was. That means three times longer for each level for those that didn't play 20+ hours a day for the first week of Delta Rising. Longer times means more hours of endless and repetitive grinding.
If you've only got one or two characters, that may not be horrendous, but a lot of us have a lot of characters because, once upon a time, the game was fun to have some variety with. Once you're running 6-10 characters, a mix in all factions, and then begin to realize the impossibility of most of those characters being effective in end-game content...it's more than a little frustrating. We've spent time, money and resources gaining ships, gear and leveling...only to be told...oops, too bad, now you've got a bunch of paperweight toons that can't really play much of anything anymore.
Twelve toons, one mission...enjoy STO
House of DILLIGAF (KDF)
^^^^ + 10000000 percent. Kudos to this poster!
Marc, the problem is that it also blanket punishes those of us who've never exploited, and it's inconsistent. UP UNTIL you reach Lvl 50 on a character, the SP is the same as it was before...this is for DOFF missions, episodes, etc. ONCE YOU REACH 50, you hit the brick wall of SP nerf...and the values are approximately 1/3 what they used to be.
I'm not upset about correcting exploits...I dislike them as much as you do. What I don't appreciate is the changing of long-standing mechanics to throttle the progress of players. It's no different than cell phone companies that throttle "unlimited" data after a certain allowance...it's a bait and switch.
Twelve toons, one mission...enjoy STO
House of DILLIGAF (KDF)
I guess you don't understand the difference between "had" & "have"
even if all you do is sit still, you're still online, so you're supporting them and their "ingame players" stats.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
Ah TRIBBLE it, Cryptic have made their bed. Actually, if enough people do the same thing at the same time in the same location, it could cause problems.
Cryptics PR/CS machine is designed to "divide and conquer" the playerbase. However, if the playerbase organised, it would cause them problems.
Cheers!
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Cheers!
"While many players participated a little in the exploited maps, very few really took advantage of it to excessively level characters. We identified this small number of players, and we have removed the excess levels from these characters."
You took roughly 300,000 XP from me. And yet, I was nowhere near Tau Dewa, nor did engage in any team leveling up; nor have I been grouping with anyone (outside of PUGs). I *have* been doing a 'Shutdown' mission, near DS9, but did NOT, at any time, team-grind said mission, nor otherwise used team-trickery, or anything else, to take advtantage of NPC's with their level lowered. Solo-ed only. You have your logs to back this up.
Essentially, you are saying repeating an age-old story mission, over and over again, solo, on Elite, is 'exploitative.' I submit to you that doing so is the very definition of grinding!
Also, I find your punishment excessive, disproportionate, and, most of all, absolutely uncalled for. You could have sufficed saying something to the public like "Gee, we really didn't mean for you to solo that mission over and over again, and had kinda hoped you would play more DR content." But me solo-ing that mission did not, in any way, shape, or form, justify stealing 300,000 of my well-earned skillpoints.
So, I'd like my XP back, as I did *not* engage in any exploitative behavior.
Not if we wear breen enviro suits
*cough* largegroupschangingcostumesrapidly *cough*
nothing like trying to make yourself look good after you made a goof huh, well done good job etc etc.
To be fair though i would have done the same thing and hoped no one would spot the change
just so those who are new to this topic are wondering what the hell some of us are talking about, the original start of this thread was as follows
Hey everyone!
The development team became recently aware of a potential exploit with Tau Dewa and after initial investigation decided to shut down access to the maps that were being used by the exploiters in order for the team to perform a deeper investigation.
We uncovered some bugs in the game that were being used by a very select few players for exploitation. Fixes to these bugs have gone live today that should remove the exploit. Details of the changes can be found in the release notes.
A lot of players were on the maps, but very few people took advantage of this. We have identified this extremely small number of players have taken appropriate action.
I really apologize for the inconvenience of closed maps during the investigation and for the bugs that led to the scramble around those maps. The team was focused on it, and due to the nature of the exploit, I did not want to discuss the details heavily. Now that everything is fixed, I wanted to let everyone know a little more about what was going on.
~LaughingTrendy
Fixed that for you LaughingTrendy, did not want anyone confused
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=20187941&postcount=13