If I'm pointing at no one, then there shouldn't be an issue with my opinion.
10 spec points was the cut-off point. If someone lost 1 or 2 spec points, could they have been reasonably ignorant about it being an exploit? Sure. But from what was explained, that was not the worst of it.
The people doing this to excess knew what they were getting into, and I think they should have known better.
I'm talking about the people who could recognize that 17 times the XP rate gain was highly unusual and not intentional.
If someone wants to say they think that is normal for the game, I will say they are either extremely oblivious or downright dishonest.
But I am also saying that doesn't seem to be the case for most of the people in this thread, and I apologize if that is what was interpreted.
I find it statistically unlikely all ~250 accounts are in the forums to begin with.
The issue is there were two ways to do the excessive XP bit - One that should be acceptable, one that is a definite exploit. (and should be fixed)
please point me to where i defended cryptic? you wont' find any defense in this thread. my points remain the same:
1) whining on the weekend accomplishes nothing because the people who should be hearing your complaints are off until monday.
2) vote with your dollars not with your words. dollars are the only thing they care about. someone can complain all they want but if the game has 50k people pumping money into the cstore daily the 2k people on the forum are meaningless.
3) don't pretend you're the most important person in the world just because the game doesn't do what you wanted it to do. cryptic's going to listen to the people who spend money. that's just basic economics.
none of that has anything do with liking or hating cryptic. it's just basic common sense.
Then why are you engaging me in a combative dialogue? I basically agree with all of this. The one thing I disagree with is the weekend thing. Weekends don't exist anymore. They just made a big release and they are under some heavy fire. It would be silly to believe that they have just tuned it all out and are not paying attention -- they most definitely are. The Internet and the mass explosion of devices we use mean we are always connected to our work, our friends, and everything else whether we're in the office or sitting on the toilet seat.
As alluded to some time earlier, it seems that the "17x" debacle was due to both high dps and cstore xp boosts.
Neither of these are exploits. One is borderline OCD at having an uber video game build, and the other was sold...by Cryptic.
Did they intend for it to be used thusly? Obviously not. I can't imagine that high DPS + Elite teaming + C Store boosts = dishonesty. Just tossing that out is insulting and misinformed, and, frankly, dbaggy.
I could be wrong, but automatically crucifying people as liars and cheats based on assumption and dev spin is pretty crappy, and shame on those of you doing it. On one hand telling people they don't know the whole story, then presuming that they, themselves, do.
No, I have had no points taken away. I don't actually know personally of anyone having had points taken away. But this situation doesn't seem right to me. Maybe it's just me. The whole "exploit," "cheater," "liar," etc. is shameful.
The truth it that no one usually checks the forums. Not on the weekend. Not on monday. Never. However, every once in a while, like I already mentioned, like when devs removed Dil from STFs, they DO suddenly notice a massive outcry (and again I repeat, this one already is louder than the one over Dil a year ago. maybe you weren't there then, whereas others (like me) have been around since Beta, so I guess you have no way of remembering.
And back then, the devs noticed "even during the weekend". Yeah...
i was in the closed beta and i saw the game launch after many complaints were made in beta about it not being ready. i was in head start when everyone swore the game would be dead in 3 months. but since the game's gone ftp money is the only thing that's mattered. i saw thousands of posts from people hating lockboxes and keys. they're still here, and we get a new one every 3 months. why are they still here even though so many complain about them? because money talks. no matter how much we complained tens of thousans are still in the game buying keys to get those items.
The other was an actual exploit. (no question, definitely exploit - Devs were still warned about it mind...)
Put away your pitchfork for just a little, at least until the issue has been cleared up.
ETA - Yesterday, it was posted about a small group of players doing an exploit. I called it a mythical group, and said it appeared to be a deflection job - I was wrong.
Cryptic may or may not handle it correctly going forward, but they deserve some slack.
How can anyone in this game cheat or exploit anything
Everything in this game was created by cryptic
The players use what cryptic creates and gives us
and Cryptic gives us no rules or limits on how fast we can levels or earn dilithium
If and I say IF
A player goes into the database and changes it to get some benefit... that Is a Cheat and a Exploit
using our buttons to play the game is not a cheat or exploit and anyone who says it is Is mistaken and wrong
To label these 300 players as cheaters and exploiters is wrong...If anything they were playtesters !
If those players made levels 17x faster than intended .....Its Cryptics fault for not playtesting there product not the players for playing it
Jellico....Engineer ground.....Da'val Romulan space Sci
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
Then why are you engaging me in a combative dialogue?
i only want to point out something in case you haven't been paying attention. you've called me an apologist and a fanboy in this thread simply because i had a different opinion then yours.
As alluded to some time earlier, it seems that the "17x" debacle was due to both high dps and cstore xp boosts..
Where is the is 17x coming from?! Had an NPC paid out 20,400 XP (17 x 1,200), I would have assuredly known something was up. Bosses only paid out the 1,200, of course.
And XP booster packs?! They were abso-frikkin'-lutely specifically meant to be used for... wait for it... XP boosting! Didn't use any myself, really, as I'm neither made of pure Zen or pure EC. :P But others having used them, shame on you, Cryptic! You sold them for that *exact* purpose! No ifs, no buts.
D'Angelo, you may have realized people were going faster than you had envisioned they would. Yet, instead of taking personal (and professional) responsibility for maybe having less than optimized XP loot tables, you went the other direction, and started accusing people of being exploiters for not having noticed themselves either! This was a grave faux pas, really.
i was in the closed beta and i saw the game launch after many complaints were made in beta about it not being ready. i was in head start when everyone swore the game would be dead in 3 months. but since the game's gone ftp money is the only thing that's mattered. i saw thousands of posts from people hating lockboxes and keys. they're still here, and we get a new one every 3 months. why are they still here even though so many complain about them? because money talks. no matter how much we complained tens of thousans are still in the game buying keys to get those items.
I was there also. I followed STO before Cryptic even had the rights to it. Back when the other company did (I don't have a great memory) and it looked like the project was dead in the water until Cryptic came along with their big promises of having experience, a rapid development process due to the existence of their proprietary engine, etc. I was there through all the management crisis (which include D'Angelo.) I was there when Atari bailed. I was there when PWE came on board. And that's when I left: the day they tried to force me to create a PWE account.
Those lock boxes really angered me back then. This time they sucked me in (it's why I spent $400 on Zen -- although I also used it to upgrade different account features for my main character and the new ones I made) -- but I got suckered in this time and I really am angry at myself for it. I'm actually a little surprised at myself because I knew how evil those boxes are and I'm not the gambling type at all. Those things are pure evil.
Where is the is 17x coming from?! Had an NPC paid out 20,400 XP (17 x 1,200), I would have assuredly known something was up. Bosses only paid out the 1,200, of course.
And XP booster packs?! They were abso-frikkin'-lutely specifically meant to be used for... wait for it... XP boosting! Didn't use any myself, really, as I'm neither made of pure Zen or pure EC. :P But others having used them, shame on you, Cryptic! You sold them for that *exact* purpose! No ifs, no buts.
D'Angelo, you may have realized people were going faster than you had envisioned they would. Yet, instead of taking personal (and professional) responsibility for maybe having less than optimized XP loot tables, you went the other direction, and started accusing people of being exploiters for not having noticed themselves either! This was a grave faux pas, really.
Clue: You are not the sort of player who should be whacked over stuff in a system where players get whacked over stuff that is the Dev's fault.
Just keep waiting on the support system, and assuming you did what you say you did, you will get the levels restored.
Or at least some, depends on whether it is at before or after Elite XP nerf rates...
I think the picture is pretty clear to me now. This wasn't about Dilithium, or magic XP booster packs that could allegedly bypass the refining limit (really, people!). Nor was it about Tau Dewa even (where I never was). Nor was it about team-trickery (as I was never in such team).
No, the banality of this is that I'm apparently being charged with... having played on Elite, whereas I supposedly should have known Elite was not meant to pay out 5x, but only 2 times. As if I keep track of Cryptic's XP loot tables! Never has it occured to D'Angelo that I haven't looked at XP for the last few years! I leveled up within a week or so, after joining STO, and have never since looked at XP, other than realizing it got apparently converted to 27+ million EXP now. Apparently I should have known that 1,200 XP for a Vaadvaur boss was too much. Well, I didn't.
Also, I only chose that DS9 mission because someone mentioned it here, and how handy it was, as waves keep spawning. Which, I haste to say, is absolutely no exploit! Because if it had only like 5 waves or so, I would have simply replayed the mission over and over again. Same difference. Just seemed like a quiet little spot for me to do my grinding, is all.
Honestly, I think D'Angelo has taken an unusually self-centered stance on this (what with himself, of course, being eminently familiar with XP loot tables). And then he concluded, unduly harshly, that people having played on Elite are exploiters, and must now be punished. And, I have to admit, I feel quite a bit of resentment over it. This isn't over Tomorrow.
That's interesting because I always played on Elite. When I came back, I did the episodes I missed out on and I was one mission away from the last episode when the new expansion was released. I completed that and went to the Delta Quadrant. I was able to finish the first mission on Elite but try as I might I could not get past that Undine thing in the second mission, so I lowered my difficulty bar after about the tenth try...but then I got distracted with other aspects of the game and never went back to the Delta Quadrant and only did a few STFs here and there. I didn't lose any points, and maybe it is because I moved my slider down at just the right time.
Clue: You are not the sort of player who should be whacked over stuff in a system where players get whacked over stuff that is the Dev's fault.
Just keep waiting on the support system, and assuming you did what you say you did, you will get the levels restored.
Sadly, though, Customer Support works kinda circular at PWE: the GM I sent a report to first asked me to just file a Bug Report. And the Bug Report folks just referred me back to Trendy's official forum post.
How can anyone in this game cheat or exploit anything
Everything in this game was created by cryptic
How can you convict me of robbing this bank? The bank had the money, they provided the paper, they even provided the pen. All I did was write a note on the paper, and no one stopped me from doing that, so it must be okay!
(That's called reductio ad absurdum. If your argument is absurd taken to the extreme, you should check to see if it's absurd prima facie, as well. And it is.)
How can you convict me of robbing this bank? The bank had the money, they provided the paper, they even provided the pen. All I did was write a note on the paper, and no one stopped me from doing that, so it must be okay!
(That's called reductio ad absurdum. If your argument is absurd taken to the extreme, you should check to see if it's absurd prima facie, as well. And it is.)
Perhaps his point was lost on you. He is referring to a game. You are referring to real life. Tis dangerous to confuse the two.
see most of player here miss the big picture of cryptic,
Since a long time now they cut more and more all the in-game income, as I remember (and maybe not in the good order) :
They put a loot limitation
They decrease the value of the trash at the vendor
They delete many part of the game ( exploration ...)
Now they cut by half the sft reward ( it was the main income for many player) and increase the time for finish it
They increase the HP of all the npc and seriously they are clever enough for know that just increase the HP don't make it more difficult but make just longer to kill.
All of that is a plan from cryptic for make the grind longer, the player income lower, that create more impatient player so more money for cryptic. And of course they let the possibilities of grind all of that so when you come complain you have some player come and say you are stupid you can do it without pay ....
so all what happen is for make you more and more impatient, discourage and start to pay.
Look what happen since the last patch note arrive, every bodies is so focus on what happen in Tau dewa than nobodies talk any more about the nerf of the stf reward. That the cryptic way.
And by the way i have a question, what about the exploration in game ?
And for the bug in the game with cryptic it work in this way :
Did the bug make them make less money ?
Yes : so it will be fix now
No : It can way ( SOON TM)
So is time to take the power in this game to fight all together or we will fall in a phone game model for STO.
Sadly, though, Customer Support works kinda circular at PWE: the GM I sent a report to first asked me to just file a Bug Report. And the Bug Report folks just referred me back to Trendy's official forum post.
Well, all I can say is keep trying, nothing else any of us can do.
That's interesting because I always played on Elite. When I came back, I did the episodes I missed out on and I was one mission away from the last episode when the new expansion was released. I completed that and went to the Delta Quadrant. I was able to finish the first mission on Elite but try as I might I could not get past that Undine thing in the second mission, so I lowered my difficulty bar after about the tenth try...but then I got distracted with other aspects of the game and never went back to the Delta Quadrant and only did a few STFs here and there. I didn't lose any points, and maybe it is because I moved my slider down at just the right time.
Actually it's more likely that because you weren't gaining xp at a pre-defined rate that exceeded some arbitrary expectation by the EP and his dev team, that you weren't hit.
I didn't gain XP horrendously fast, but it was fast enough to level at similar to the double XP event the 2 weeks prior. Because of that event and running 4 characters through it to lvl 50, I didn't even notice that there was a problem. The loot drops felt about right, the XP wasn't excessive in the runs I did, though some were much easier than others admittedly, going over logs, I did notice a couple of runs that gave lvl 60 exp for only level 52 content. Even so most runs were actually groups of similarly leveled players and damage/reward was pretty worth it. Now the rewards don't even come close to matching the time investment.
D'Angelo you state that some were lvling at 17x the rate. Awesome, so they utilised the Boosts and other methods to gain xp faster then used the errors you left in the game AFTER having had bug reports of them. You failed in your task to release the content with those XP sinks fixed, not the players. Some may have heavily exploited it (less than 300 characters) and others have managed to lvl fast enough in places like Argala and even the Shutdown mission (which is bugged by the way...). You shut down Tau Dewa, yet intimate it was not just the Tau Dewa patrols causing the issue.
Instead of shutting down the maps, a quick fix would have been to correct the XP being gained, as the teamwork and friendliness of the players that were participating was unprecedented for STO and was one of the few times I've actually really enjoyed the game.
I think you need to take a long hard look at what you put out with DR as currently it's not up the standards of people who make Foundry missions from a pacing and logic point of view. The production of the elements is definitely higher, with the voice overs and so on, but the actual gameplay and the HUGE breaks in flow that ruin any agency with it are just pitiful.
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."
Maybe if you made advance content that didn't leave you feeling CAR JACKED when an option failed you may have not had to deal with so many people going to Japori.
I went there a couple time with a fleet group, why, because the damn advance queues are empty! I use to be able to pug all my favorites with very little wait. I have not pugged anything but disconnected normal since the release of DR and the infuriating revelation that a botched optional now awards a ten mark slap in the face and a get-out-of-here-loser boot in the rear.
Perhaps his point was lost on you. He is referring to a game. You are referring to real life. Tis dangerous to confuse the two.
He seems to do it quite often. Its best to just ignore him as he'll keep doing his best, although failing horribly at it, to defend cryptic til his last breath.
Where is the is 17x coming from?! Had an NPC paid out 20,400 XP (17 x 1,200), I would have assuredly known something was up. Bosses only paid out the 1,200, of course.
That's the thing, I think it's supposed to be 17x faster not the actual amount of XP per Kill ... which also makes me wonder how they came up with this number ... because last time I checked everyone has different DPS Outputs etc etc etc ... I guess that's why he used "approximately" ... but still begs the question 17x faster than what/who exactly ...
Kind of boils down to : "You should have noticed you're not that good at this game" ... which is pretty bizarre imho ....
Patch Notes : Resolved an Issue, where people would accidently experience Fun.
The OP was a great explaination of the dev's thinking with regard to the recent unpleasantness in Tau Dewa and I applaud Mr. D'Angelo for making that first step. However, that's all it was: a first step. Cryptic's customer relations are at an all-time low right now, toxicity is running high and the least little thing will start the flames up again.
There are many more steps that need to be taken, one very important one is the handling of all of these reports of undeserved Specialization point loss. You made the mistake of basically calling some people out in your post and that's already moving to bit you in the posterior. Deal with these reports quickly and fairly and hopefully the heat on this matter with diminish still further.
But what you, and everyone at Cryptic, need to realize is that silence is your enemy. In the absence of information your players will quite happily speculate and that generally leads to the worst possible take on any given situation. Things don't simply 'blow over' when you play the quiet game, it simmers and festers and only makes later reactions worse because we remember your mis-steps of the past.
The prevailant view of Cryptic at this point is that you don't listen to our feedback, even when asked for it specifically, or you don't act on it if you do listen. That you look on the player base as 'the enemy' rather than a vast pool of potential allies. And that you are, in general, out to cheat your players at every conceivable turn. Personally I believe this to be FAR from the truth, but sometimes that view is difficult to argue with.
We all need to work on that, of course, but an increased community engagement would be very helpful. Talk to us and we'll listen, listen to us and we might just have good ideas to share, play with us and maybe we can all enjoy this game more.
Perhaps his point was lost on you. He is referring to a game. You are referring to real life. Tis dangerous to confuse the two.
Try paragraph two. When you find something that lets you cheat at a game, and you use it, it's your fault for cheating, not someone else's fault for being a sucker.
I sure wouldn't want to play chess with quite a lot of you - you'd apparently think it was fair play to move pieces around the board while I wasn't looking. After all, if you weren't supposed to do it the pieces would be nailed down, right?
So you say 300 chars (250 accounts) were exploiting to a serious extent. Why then does it look like far more than that have had spec points pulled (ie. they were exploiting)?
Whoever posted under the 'Q' account the the other day needs to be spanked and spanked hard. This has been my biggest issue and it now has to be taken as company gospel. Blanket accusation of exploiting to cover your hides for your mistake is unprofessional and stinks of "saving face" in front of your superiors.
Please see the light on this. You are alienating your playerbase.
Cheers!
Sound like these guys pulled out a witch hunt that they do not dare mention to us.
That's the thing, I think it's supposed to be 17x faster not the actual amount of XP per Kill ... which also makes me wonder how they came up with this number ... because last time I checked everyone has different DPS Outputs etc etc etc ... I guess that's why he used "approximately" ... but still begs the question 17x faster than what/who exactly ...
Well, I know, for a fact, that I'm not 17x better than other players. I do a modest 22k, enough to get me thru on Elite, but nothing spectacular. I probably *am* 17 times better than someone doing 1k. But punishing ppl for being above-minimum, that feels like an awefully slippery slope! Not to mention, quite, quite, unjust.
Comments
The issue is there were two ways to do the excessive XP bit - One that should be acceptable, one that is a definite exploit. (and should be fixed)
Then why are you engaging me in a combative dialogue? I basically agree with all of this. The one thing I disagree with is the weekend thing. Weekends don't exist anymore. They just made a big release and they are under some heavy fire. It would be silly to believe that they have just tuned it all out and are not paying attention -- they most definitely are. The Internet and the mass explosion of devices we use mean we are always connected to our work, our friends, and everything else whether we're in the office or sitting on the toilet seat.
Firesworn Nation (@rswfire) - https://www.firesworn.com
Neither of these are exploits. One is borderline OCD at having an uber video game build, and the other was sold...by Cryptic.
Did they intend for it to be used thusly? Obviously not. I can't imagine that high DPS + Elite teaming + C Store boosts = dishonesty. Just tossing that out is insulting and misinformed, and, frankly, dbaggy.
I could be wrong, but automatically crucifying people as liars and cheats based on assumption and dev spin is pretty crappy, and shame on those of you doing it. On one hand telling people they don't know the whole story, then presuming that they, themselves, do.
No, I have had no points taken away. I don't actually know personally of anyone having had points taken away. But this situation doesn't seem right to me. Maybe it's just me. The whole "exploit," "cheater," "liar," etc. is shameful.
Now, what is the news on the actual bugs that are making gameplay rough?
The other was an actual exploit. (no question, definitely exploit - Devs were still warned about it mind...)
Put away your pitchfork for just a little, at least until the issue has been cleared up.
ETA - Yesterday, it was posted about a small group of players doing an exploit. I called it a mythical group, and said it appeared to be a deflection job - I was wrong.
Cryptic may or may not handle it correctly going forward, but they deserve some slack.
Everything in this game was created by cryptic
The players use what cryptic creates and gives us
and Cryptic gives us no rules or limits on how fast we can levels or earn dilithium
If and I say IF
A player goes into the database and changes it to get some benefit... that Is a Cheat and a Exploit
using our buttons to play the game is not a cheat or exploit and anyone who says it is Is mistaken and wrong
To label these 300 players as cheaters and exploiters is wrong...If anything they were playtesters !
If those players made levels 17x faster than intended .....Its Cryptics fault for not playtesting there product not the players for playing it
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
If it wasn't an exploit, then why punish those people as exploiters by taking away rewards? It's a slippery slope.
That is what the giving them space is for, to clear the issue up and sort out any wrongly affected players.
If that doesn't happen however...
Where is the is 17x coming from?! Had an NPC paid out 20,400 XP (17 x 1,200), I would have assuredly known something was up. Bosses only paid out the 1,200, of course.
And XP booster packs?! They were abso-frikkin'-lutely specifically meant to be used for... wait for it... XP boosting!
D'Angelo, you may have realized people were going faster than you had envisioned they would. Yet, instead of taking personal (and professional) responsibility for maybe having less than optimized XP loot tables, you went the other direction, and started accusing people of being exploiters for not having noticed themselves either! This was a grave faux pas, really.
I was there also. I followed STO before Cryptic even had the rights to it. Back when the other company did (I don't have a great memory) and it looked like the project was dead in the water until Cryptic came along with their big promises of having experience, a rapid development process due to the existence of their proprietary engine, etc. I was there through all the management crisis (which include D'Angelo.) I was there when Atari bailed. I was there when PWE came on board. And that's when I left: the day they tried to force me to create a PWE account.
Those lock boxes really angered me back then. This time they sucked me in (it's why I spent $400 on Zen -- although I also used it to upgrade different account features for my main character and the new ones I made) -- but I got suckered in this time and I really am angry at myself for it. I'm actually a little surprised at myself because I knew how evil those boxes are and I'm not the gambling type at all. Those things are pure evil.
Firesworn Nation (@rswfire) - https://www.firesworn.com
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=20198141&postcount=423
Clue: You are not the sort of player who should be whacked over stuff in a system where players get whacked over stuff that is the Dev's fault.
Just keep waiting on the support system, and assuming you did what you say you did, you will get the levels restored.
Or at least some, depends on whether it is at before or after Elite XP nerf rates...
That's interesting because I always played on Elite. When I came back, I did the episodes I missed out on and I was one mission away from the last episode when the new expansion was released. I completed that and went to the Delta Quadrant. I was able to finish the first mission on Elite but try as I might I could not get past that Undine thing in the second mission, so I lowered my difficulty bar after about the tenth try...but then I got distracted with other aspects of the game and never went back to the Delta Quadrant and only did a few STFs here and there. I didn't lose any points, and maybe it is because I moved my slider down at just the right time.
Firesworn Nation (@rswfire) - https://www.firesworn.com
Sadly, though, Customer Support works kinda circular at PWE: the GM I sent a report to first asked me to just file a Bug Report. And the Bug Report folks just referred me back to Trendy's official forum post.
(That's called reductio ad absurdum. If your argument is absurd taken to the extreme, you should check to see if it's absurd prima facie, as well. And it is.)
Perhaps his point was lost on you. He is referring to a game. You are referring to real life. Tis dangerous to confuse the two.
Since a long time now they cut more and more all the in-game income, as I remember (and maybe not in the good order) :
They put a loot limitation
They decrease the value of the trash at the vendor
They delete many part of the game ( exploration ...)
Now they cut by half the sft reward ( it was the main income for many player) and increase the time for finish it
They increase the HP of all the npc and seriously they are clever enough for know that just increase the HP don't make it more difficult but make just longer to kill.
All of that is a plan from cryptic for make the grind longer, the player income lower, that create more impatient player so more money for cryptic. And of course they let the possibilities of grind all of that so when you come complain you have some player come and say you are stupid you can do it without pay ....
so all what happen is for make you more and more impatient, discourage and start to pay.
Look what happen since the last patch note arrive, every bodies is so focus on what happen in Tau dewa than nobodies talk any more about the nerf of the stf reward. That the cryptic way.
And by the way i have a question, what about the exploration in game ?
And for the bug in the game with cryptic it work in this way :
Did the bug make them make less money ?
Yes : so it will be fix now
No : It can way ( SOON TM)
So is time to take the power in this game to fight all together or we will fall in a phone game model for STO.
Well, all I can say is keep trying, nothing else any of us can do.
Actually it's more likely that because you weren't gaining xp at a pre-defined rate that exceeded some arbitrary expectation by the EP and his dev team, that you weren't hit.
I didn't gain XP horrendously fast, but it was fast enough to level at similar to the double XP event the 2 weeks prior. Because of that event and running 4 characters through it to lvl 50, I didn't even notice that there was a problem. The loot drops felt about right, the XP wasn't excessive in the runs I did, though some were much easier than others admittedly, going over logs, I did notice a couple of runs that gave lvl 60 exp for only level 52 content. Even so most runs were actually groups of similarly leveled players and damage/reward was pretty worth it. Now the rewards don't even come close to matching the time investment.
D'Angelo you state that some were lvling at 17x the rate. Awesome, so they utilised the Boosts and other methods to gain xp faster then used the errors you left in the game AFTER having had bug reports of them. You failed in your task to release the content with those XP sinks fixed, not the players. Some may have heavily exploited it (less than 300 characters) and others have managed to lvl fast enough in places like Argala and even the Shutdown mission (which is bugged by the way...). You shut down Tau Dewa, yet intimate it was not just the Tau Dewa patrols causing the issue.
Instead of shutting down the maps, a quick fix would have been to correct the XP being gained, as the teamwork and friendliness of the players that were participating was unprecedented for STO and was one of the few times I've actually really enjoyed the game.
I think you need to take a long hard look at what you put out with DR as currently it's not up the standards of people who make Foundry missions from a pacing and logic point of view. The production of the elements is definitely higher, with the voice overs and so on, but the actual gameplay and the HUGE breaks in flow that ruin any agency with it are just pitiful.
"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."
I went there a couple time with a fleet group, why, because the damn advance queues are empty! I use to be able to pug all my favorites with very little wait. I have not pugged anything but disconnected normal since the release of DR and the infuriating revelation that a botched optional now awards a ten mark slap in the face and a get-out-of-here-loser boot in the rear.
Explain me that, Stephen.
Sincerely, a tick-off subscriber.
He seems to do it quite often. Its best to just ignore him as he'll keep doing his best, although failing horribly at it, to defend cryptic til his last breath.
That's the thing, I think it's supposed to be 17x faster not the actual amount of XP per Kill ... which also makes me wonder how they came up with this number ... because last time I checked everyone has different DPS Outputs etc etc etc ... I guess that's why he used "approximately" ... but still begs the question 17x faster than what/who exactly ...
Kind of boils down to : "You should have noticed you're not that good at this game" ... which is pretty bizarre imho ....
There are many more steps that need to be taken, one very important one is the handling of all of these reports of undeserved Specialization point loss. You made the mistake of basically calling some people out in your post and that's already moving to bit you in the posterior. Deal with these reports quickly and fairly and hopefully the heat on this matter with diminish still further.
But what you, and everyone at Cryptic, need to realize is that silence is your enemy. In the absence of information your players will quite happily speculate and that generally leads to the worst possible take on any given situation. Things don't simply 'blow over' when you play the quiet game, it simmers and festers and only makes later reactions worse because we remember your mis-steps of the past.
The prevailant view of Cryptic at this point is that you don't listen to our feedback, even when asked for it specifically, or you don't act on it if you do listen. That you look on the player base as 'the enemy' rather than a vast pool of potential allies. And that you are, in general, out to cheat your players at every conceivable turn. Personally I believe this to be FAR from the truth, but sometimes that view is difficult to argue with.
We all need to work on that, of course, but an increased community engagement would be very helpful. Talk to us and we'll listen, listen to us and we might just have good ideas to share, play with us and maybe we can all enjoy this game more.
I sure wouldn't want to play chess with quite a lot of you - you'd apparently think it was fair play to move pieces around the board while I wasn't looking. After all, if you weren't supposed to do it the pieces would be nailed down, right?
Sound like these guys pulled out a witch hunt that they do not dare mention to us.
Well, I know, for a fact, that I'm not 17x better than other players. I do a modest 22k, enough to get me thru on Elite, but nothing spectacular. I probably *am* 17 times better than someone doing 1k. But punishing ppl for being above-minimum, that feels like an awefully slippery slope! Not to mention, quite, quite, unjust.