Borg Disconnected XP Gains

onerats

So.. I logged in yesterday to find that I had lost 8 of my 18 spec points. Yay. Needless to say I was thrilled to learn that apparently there was some sort of exploit and I somehow ended up in the net. Dunno if what I was doing was an exploit or not, but maybe so as it looks to have been changed. Ran all the story missions on elite up until about level 58 when enemy HP got absolutely obnoxious even for my 20k+ dps. After hitting 60 I teamed up with my fleet mates as much as possible and ran STF's. We hit two in particular on every cooldown - Borg Disconnected and Undine Assault. These two seemed to have plenty of high value targets up for grabs, and we blew them away as fast as possible. When these were on cooldown we tended to go nuts in the borg stf's, as they were a nice fun break where we could all but instantly kill everything we looked at and it was hilarious doing Cure runs in 2 minutes or less - even if the XP was beyond terrible at something like 1-2k a run.

Several days ago I was averaging something like 12k a run in BD-N and UA-N. Today I'm having trouble breaking 2.5k. This is due to two different factors - first, XP per kill seems to be drastically lowered to something like half of what it was. Second, in BD-N at least, enemies are spawning FAR less frequently. Before it felt like they respawned almost as fast as we could kill them. Now, I'm finding myself falling asleep at the keyboard waiting for them to come back. If this is intentional, then it's a terrible design philosophy. It's taken two of the only STF's worth running in terms of XP and reduced them to a bare trickle. What's worse, it's flat out not fun. Before I had a blast blowing through borg ships as fast as I possibly could. It was a race to see how many kills I could get before time ran out. Now, it's just sitting and waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And oh, hey a.. never mind, blew it up before it finished warping in.

I know there will be some that will say go play advanced - and I would love to, but that's even worse. Missions fail before they even get started and enemies have health bars like mountains. If I had a full team at my level it wouldn't be an issue, but more often than not only one other player is at that level and the rest are fleet mates that aren't quite up to par, or pugs that tend to be even worse. I managed to finish a Khitomer Advanced in this fashion - two pugs in the group under 5k and the final pug under 2k - but I tell ya what, it wasn't fun and the rewards were terrible. Advanced just isn't the answer to a broken Normal and utter lack of XP rewards.

shmojo

Welcome to Cryptic, where intelligent design is made up and the customers don't matter.

ddesjardins

shmojo wrote: »

Welcome to Cryptic, where intelligent design is made up and the customers don't matter.

Intelligent Design is a work of fiction to begin with. Bad metaphor. Pseudoscience.

Cryptic is a company where the bottom line is profitability. I'm not only ok with that reality, I encourage it. The longer they remain profitable, we'll continue to see new content.

The issue here is communication. Without communication players are leaving.

Why pay money to a company who can take everything you've worked for away on a whim?

onerats

It's more than just communication here though, I don't know anyone who used this tau dewa exploit or w/e but I do know several who did not and yet were punished as harshly as I was. I don't feel that we cheated, we were simply playing STF's like we always do - the only difference was that we chose which one to play based on potential XP gain rather than which mark type we needed. That's beside the point though. What's done is done, and they're not likely to fix it or even apologize to anyone who was innocent. What I'm frustrated with now is the almost complete lack of progress since these changes, and what has become a boring slog through an extremely slow moving mission.

And yeah, I'm more than a little hesitant to put any effort into this when it could all just disappear again without any warning or explanation.

shmojo

ddesjardins wrote: »

The issue here is communication. Without communication players are leaving.

There's this game on steam that was greenlit, inidiegogo'd, and kickstartered. The Devs for it garnered support by promising all kinds of flashy, cool things. Unfortunately for them and their backers, they didn't communicate at all with the community until it was a bit too late. Then ended up pissing away all the funding they got and released an unfinished, buggy product with promises of updating it based on future sales. But due to their mishandling of everything, that will never happen, because it got so many bad reviews that future sales are almost guaranteed to not happen.

I see cryptic going down that exact same road with DR and the mess of patches. They've shown to have contempt for the playerbase and a lack of understanding of what needs to be done.

unsacredgrave

onerats wrote: »

we were simply playing STF's like we always do - the only difference was that we chose which one to play based on potential XP gain rather than which mark type we needed.

thats the exploit. you cheated by doing that. and thats why you got punished.

ddesjardins

I completely agree with you. It is more than communication; the xp nerf, dil slashing, rollbacks, bad code, missing items, and the general lack of QA.

The fun left the game one week ago today. Casual players are leaving.

If Cryptic had said:

OK Guys, we're profitable but not profitable enough for the long term growth of the game. We have a few ideas we're going to try and we know there will be a vocal negative response to it.

Here's the rub: Less dilithium will equal more content. More content will mean more casual players in the long run. That's our profitable sweet-spot.

To achieve this we're gonna make the end game much harder. Not overkill, but we realize some of you may see us as pushing the line a little too much. We are listening and will try to adjust.

For those of you with multiple alts, this is probably going to hurt you the most. We don't want to alienate anyone, but at the end of the day we need to be a company that reflects the needs of our customers.

So effective immediately we're dropping exploration and replacing it with player sponsored missions in the Foundry. Authors who make it into the top ten every month will get a 50,000 dilithium stipend as a gift from us. We're also updating the ease in which a mission can be made and marketed within the game.

Effective immediately our first goal will be the Federation. Everything else is optional - romulan and Klingons. We do plan to bring another aligned-faction in the future, but we do so with the knowledge that the Federation is our first concern.

Effective immediately we're ignoring PvP. End of conversation. We might address it in the future, we might not - but for the next 18 months we will not even discuss it.

As for dilithium and XP, we're rolling back everything by 90%. Get used to it.

As for the STF's, well now that they have no dilithium or XP value, we're going to make them tougher. Why? Because 29 players have figured out how to beat them easily because they can exploit our code. We're not bothering to reengineer them, just raise the difficulty.

Lastly we're introducing a tax and ability nerf on all existing ships every October with the release of a new class of ships and the obligatory upgrade token.

Judge us not by our words, but by our actions.

Now that I could accept.

onerats

unsacredgrave wrote: »

thats the exploit. you cheated by doing that. and thats why you got punished.

That I just can't accept. The exploit as I understand it involved some broken patrol mission and grouping mechanic. That's very different from running STF's. I didn't really do anything I wouldn't normally do - just played the darn game as always. I ran the STF's that gave me the rewards I wanted and were fun to play. That happened to be the new one and the only other one with decent numbers of enemies to kill. It wasn't any sort of exploit, and it wasn't superbly fast - I can't tell you how many dozen times I ran through various STF's but it was quite a few.. and I was only at 8 additional spec points. Honest hard work, nothing more. If that's cheating, then absolutely anything at all is cheating.