how many HOURES of pure xp grinding should it take us to gain a SINGLE level?
WHAT could possibly be your thinking behind a SEVENTY PERCENT nerf in experience gained from npc kills in elite difficulty?
WHY does elite difficulty exist when you can earn XP at quadrupedal the rate on normal, for the same time investment as if you played elite?
is a nerf to normal difficulty XP next?
how many YEARS should it take us to complete the specialization tree?
do you honestly think anyone is going to keep playing if you don't revert just about everything you changed?
This guy is spot on.. You can post all the nonsense you want Mr. Producer but the fact is.. we hate it! You sir should be fired and replaced ASAP!!!!!!!!!!!
so far I have been enjoying the DR expansion tremendously, I have done the first 2 missions on my fed, the 2nd patrol mission was awesome and took me 3 days to complete, I aim to do these missions on my Klingon over the next 3-4 evenings I will do them on my rom maybe next weekend, its so refreshing having content that takes a good amount of time to work through rather then blazing through it in a couple of days.
at this rate I guess it will take a good few months for me to work through all of the story on my 3 characters, now that's what I call good content, I have enjoyed all of the story from the introduction of new rom and you have really excelled yourselves with this offering, you have given us something very special.
don't be surprised if I take a break from normal play when the winter event is live, I do enjoy both summer and winter events and tend to stay there make the most of them while I can and all else is forgotten.
by the way thanks for the lobi and the dilithium weekend, the extra dil is a great help and should come in dead handy for upgrading weapons.
don't get downhearted about the gripes, we all have a bit of a whinge from time to time, I hope everyone realises that sto still has loads to offer dispite everything that has passed.
keep on trekking.
But you won't be working through all the story, you will be grinding xp like crazy to actually have access to it. :P
Quote:
Originally Posted by generalklang View Post
In my long history of online gaming, this is the second time I've seen a post that pleasantly surprised me in this way.
Communication is essential with online games..between players, between developers, and between those two groups. Chaos ensues when those lines of communication fail.
Which is why our esteemed EP needs to have more post then he does at the moment (2) , after being on the job for over a year .
Quote:
Originally Posted by bwemo View Post
TD/Argaya was a level of gameplay this game hasn't seen in a long time. Id dare to say it was remanisant of pre F2P Gamma stf gatherings. People were having more fun than they've had in this game in a long time. Now, you've nerfed the exp so hard, doffing is better exp than being social with leveling. My friends list is cut down to the usually 8-10 people who haven't joined the rest in leaving. Perhaps this is time you guys step up and realize what you're labeling as an exploit has turned into the most enjoyable game time people have had in years, and would benefit you to exploit it as much as we apparently have.
QFT !
Totally agree. fuglass. First they shoot everyone with a blunderbuss and then say it was the players who fired the first shot. In the words of Chris Roberts "This is bull****".
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."
I have read the first post. I can only conclude cryptic lost connection to the player community completely. they have no clue what people do in STO or like to do. And wipping all feedback/critical topics does not help in getting to know what players think/want.
The only real thing is that Cryptic admits they have released bugged content, so did not playtest proper, or read the tribble feedback etc.
And the sentence "I hope you all have a wonderful weekend." at the end of the first post, feels very sarcastic to me. No I don't have a good weekend after all that has been done.
[WARNING: INCOMING WALL-O-TEXT. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. WALL-O-TEXT WILL NOW COMMENCE]
So, first up: None of my characters were affected. I hadn't bothered with leveling yet since I was more interested in wandering about the new Episodes. I have next to no interest in the queues, thanks to the decreased rewards, and am instead wandering about the new Episodes and Adventure Zone. So far, not a single one of my characters is level 60, and I'm fine with that for now.
That said... has it occurred to anyone making these decisions that it might not be the XP awards from defeating NPCs that was the problem, but rather the unbelievably slow rate of progression overall? I don't begrudge the progress of those players that decided to grind like an Orion on Nerve Tonic... they chose to use the best available means of progression along a path that spans an added 60 levels worth of XP. Of that 110 total levels worth of XP, only the first 60 are factored into scaling... right there is the source of balancing problems for the queues and "exploits" where players are trying to level using the best means of progression available; maybe allowing for progression comparable to pre-DR would be a better solution than leaving us bored and grinding whatever next-best option we can find, eh?
The new Episodes are solid and the Kobali Adventure Zone is decent... though poorly synced with the Klingon faction; maybe you could at least frame the Kobali as a second chance at Sto'vo'kor for Warriors that fail to die in battle? That they choose to honor the dead in a different manner does not mean that they cannot be shown to have honor. Oh, and yes Captain Kim, just because we like them better does in fact mean that my Nausicaan gets to decide who lives and who dies. He does that a lot, often by his own hand... he's even got the Kill Accolades to prove it.
After that... the queues simply take longer, relying on DPS and to a lesser extent CC... and nothing else. The rewards certainly aren't on par with what's necessary to complete them, nor the preparation that goes into Advanced or Elite. *Sigh*
Look, I understand that you've got a vision for this whole thing... but try to remember that you're making a game. You advertised raising the level cap by 10... okay, then why do we have to grind 60 additional levels worth of XP, at a slower rate than pre-DR? You advertised the Difficulty changes with Advanced being a slightly adjusted version of the pre-DR Elites... okay, why are the NPC hitpoints (far) more than doubled and the dilithium halved, when neither "double" nor "half" qualify as "slight" adjustments? You advertised that our T5 ships wouldn't be obsolete... okay, why do we have to pay to keep them relevant, and if we're paying why aren't they actually Upgraded to T6?
In the end, your focus appears to be on making the game take longer rather than making it more fun, and that seems misplaced. I apologize if I'm misinterpreting the design decisions of late, but that's what it looks like from where I'm sitting. You can keep the over-level dilithium, but give us an enjoyable rate of progression.
...
To heck with it, just read dontdrunkimshoot's post. That is indicative of what you don't want players thinking when they look at a game. It is also what many players are thinking when they look at the changes of late. Remember too... dontdrunk has been about for awhile. Now imagine what this grind looks like to someone not accustomed to it and not already geared up for it. Those someones are your prospective new players, that bring new money and make foolish purchases because they don't know any better... coax them in, don't scare them off. Please?
With each passing day I wonder if I stepped into an alternate reality. The Cubs win the world series. Donald Trump is President. Britain leaves the EU. STO gets a dedicated PvP season. Engineers are "out of control" in STO.
You advertised raising the level cap by 10... okay, then why do we have to grind 60 additional levels worth of XP, at a slower rate than pre-DR?
Usually Alternate Advancement is a great idea and the rewards minor but for some reason they made it so that you hardly get anything from leveling up to 60 and all the good stuff comes after that. No wonder people were grinding like crazy.
Usually Alternate Advancement is a great idea and the rewards minor but for some reason they made it so that you hardly get anything from leveling up to 60 and all the good stuff comes after that. No wonder people were grinding like crazy.
Just so. If the Specialization Points had been granted for levels 16+, every level 60 character would have had the ability to fill one Primary and one Secondary Specialization... which would have made the level-based scaling more accurate and kept the over-level progression horizontal in nature. This is not what was done, however, so we instead have ridiculous amounts of XP grinding ahead of us and poor scaling for level 60 queues.
The "exploit" was not the problem, the flawed design is. Look to that, please.
With each passing day I wonder if I stepped into an alternate reality. The Cubs win the world series. Donald Trump is President. Britain leaves the EU. STO gets a dedicated PvP season. Engineers are "out of control" in STO.
Well this is a welcome step in the right direction Cryptic; open communication with the community if this had been done sooner you'd probably have got a lot less flack, still a lot of upset people but at least we knew of your general thinking/acting processes on what you did, how and why even if we don't all agree at least we know what we're disagreeing on.
The problem still remains though that you really need to try harder at knowing what happens in your game and really Q&A it not just 'fix it if it breaks the game' or for the love of Star Trek "LISTEN TO YOUR COMMUNITY!" People tell you these things way in advance of launch on holodeck and yet it gets pushed out the door. It's funny that it wasn't a priority/time to fix before launch but you can immediately take swift action after and deal with the drama that ensues after.
Just try to take on board and learn lessons and you might just start winning the community back again.
You should've banned them all for life. Every single one. And all the rioters on the forums too. Get rid of them all in one fell swoop!!
Not very smart thing to do.
Because players who spend the most money obviously are the most disappointed in the actions Cryptic took, like tampering with the their toons, taking specialization points away etc. People who don't spend money on this game in the first place, just play what they enjoy and stop playing when they don't, they loose nothing because they invested nothing.
People who spend the most money on this game are mostly of a more impatient nature don't enjoy grinding for month, thats why they spend money to get things faster instead.
So swooping them as you say, whould even remove many more cash paying players, then they loose now due to the naming and shaming of the player community, calling them exploiters, punish players for cryptics mistakes like: bad release management, lacking bug tracing and lack to listen to player feedback, even closing forum topics instead of understanding the message.
If realy only a small group of people had such a big advantage as cryptic claims, why bothering. Just fix the bugs, improve release managment instead of spending lots of effort on screening all players playing logs and such.
It's never a smart thing to bite the hand that feeds you. Instead of admitting mistakes and making excusses to the player community Cryptic is putting effort in fighting the symptoms, not root causes, of the things they caused themselves in the first place.
You should've banned them all for life. Every single one. And all the rioters on the forums too. Get rid of them all in one fell swoop!!
People who cheat? Sure; ban em! Except the 'exploit' here was all in the devs' heads, as the result of gravely failing to take personal responsibility for having messed up their XP loot tables. On Elite, NPC's would pay out 5x, instead of the apparently intended 2x (and that while Elite is definitely 2x as difficult). So, people like yours truly, not being at all surprised at Elite paying out a lot more, essentially got robbed, by Cryptic, for having played on Elite. That's it. That was the alleged '
Do not know too much about the whole exploit thing as I have barely been on. However as soon as I see there were bugs and that's how it occurred, I just blame the people who made it.... when people benefit from a bug its bad...but when you cannot play a game you initially paid for, its just part of playing a MMO???? Dunno....bare in mind I'm a casual layman.
Cryptic have been testing the expansion to StarTrek online for several months.
One problem was the XP being gained whilst a person was playing on the most difficult settings. it was set high so as allow people to level faster on the test server...
The company were aware of this, as they programmed it, However they sent the information to their live server. Players noticed this and word quickly spread. Players started power levelling using the elite settings as most were unaware that the figures were wrong. The development team then started wondering why their new maps were not being played and decided to make a rare appearance in game and started asking questions. It came to light that the system was "being abused" by a select few who were reaping rewards in the form of in game currency that you can buy with real money... There in lies the problem.
Rather than fix the problem and own up to what happened, they accused the players of exploiting the game. Then altered the player experience to reflect what they believed it should be.
This is very damaging to the trust of the player base. As a result they have pitted players against each other using the divide and conquer tactics and hoping that by burying their heads in the sand they can let the players shout it out between them whilst practising the norm of ignoring the customer base.
This is a process called deferred blame. Person A does something bad or wrong and person b blames person C with the knowledge it was A.
Despite the accusations Cryptic have offered no proof. I know of several individuals who lost out and never abused the system yet got penalised. There are so many rattles on the floor that it is impossible to see how they all fitted in the one pram.
This company have stolen time and respect from the people who pay them...
What they should have done.....
Closed the loop holes and said sorry then moved on with the game.
But No... alienate the player base whilst allowing others to run in an area renowned for currency exploits..
Good move..... I have a lifetime membership of this game and have purchased many in game items, probably spent more than I should have.This stops now.....
I haven't done anything wrong and in the same vein so haven't a lot of other people, but we are all tarred with the Exploiters brush....
The real exploit here is of the players....
I am sure that when the game developers go shopping and receive back to much change they pocket it. It is usual policy when a company makes a mathematical error that the customer is not touched and is protected, procedures are then put in place to prevent further instances from happening....
Give the players back their experience and suck it up...
Your Software house made a boo-boo correct it and move on... but do not steal time from your player base
Do not know too much about the whole exploit thing as I have barely been on. However as soon as I see there were bugs and that's how it occurred, I just blame the people who made it.... when people benefit from a bug its bad...but when you cannot play a game you initially paid for, its just part of playing a MMO???? Dunno....bare in mind I'm a casual layman.
They say some people were leveling 17x faster then others in other areas. Without telling that those specific people do 17x more DPS then others in other areas.
Now they reduced XP but not the hitpoints required. So now leveling is faster on difficulty setting Normal then on Elite.
Lets all be honest now... cause we all know this is the truth.
Last week Elite was INTENDED to pay out almost 5x as much XP... cause they where boosted by more then 5x the HP + Shields and resistance to go alone with... as well as weapon power ect.
There old metrics said Almost no one played on Elite... they didn't really expect people in a MMO might group up and tackle harder content as a group. The expected even the most hard core among us would still take at least a few weeks of grinding to start seeing the end of the Spec point grind.
The reality of course was people where hitting the end of there point grind at least a week early (some earlier I'm sure).
So this week they decided the easiest way to "fix it" to a level they felt was what they wanted goal wise (2-3 months for the average daily player to finish obviously) was to call "exploit" and adjust things. Cause no one wants to be arguing so hard that they look like they must be cheaters. We are all supposed to be quite now... cause obviously we should feel dirty and just take the changes and be happy we aren't all banned. lmao
Even the teaming changes that changed the matching lower level bonuses... I would say most of that was working as intended. It was added to the game on purpose at one point for a reason.
I am fine with them making some changes to the high end of what was possible... fine perhaps it was to easy to earn large amounts of XP playing in 5 man groups. What I don't appreciate however is being lied to... and told "this is an exploit" when they over correct the numbers. I would have much more appreciated an HONEST post... that said "Look guys" we wanted this to last at least a few weeks for even our most dedicated players and we realize we have XP rewards set way to high... so we are corrected them. I could have respected that post at least.
Going forward I hope the devs are watching there "metrics" and realizing that things are set way way to low at this point. It is now more efficient to simply grind normal mode in 5 man groups... even doing that its still over an hour per spec point. Honestly if Cryptic thinks many of there players are going to commit 60+ hours of play time (OPTIMAL play time... not normal missions those gaps would mean more like 100+ hours) to max ONE toon... when many players have previously tended to 5-6... well I won't finish the thought. They will see it in there metrics more and more people will simply stop logging in. Its way to tedious... where things are set now I think to max you spec with the story missiosn you would likely have to replay the entire chain 20x at least.
Its way to tedious... where things are set now I think to max you spec with the story missiosn you would likely have to replay the entire chain 20x at least.
With 700 XP per Mission ~4200 Replays ...
Patch Notes : Resolved an Issue, where people would accidently experience Fun.
Comments
I'm excited for next week's exploit
system Lord Baal is dead
Does this mean D'Angelo will post again ... oh boy ... already wettin my pants :P
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Campaign: The Battle of Neverwinter - NWS-DOQXFA4ZD
Prologue: A not so simple plan - NW-DCJG75B9D
if ppl did that you have nothing to keep you entertain and your signatures would be boring
system Lord Baal is dead
But you won't be working through all the story, you will be grinding xp like crazy to actually have access to it. :P
Originally Posted by generalklang View Post
In my long history of online gaming, this is the second time I've seen a post that pleasantly surprised me in this way.
Communication is essential with online games..between players, between developers, and between those two groups. Chaos ensues when those lines of communication fail.
Which is why our esteemed EP needs to have more post then he does at the moment (2) , after being on the job for over a year .
Quote:
Originally Posted by bwemo View Post
TD/Argaya was a level of gameplay this game hasn't seen in a long time. Id dare to say it was remanisant of pre F2P Gamma stf gatherings. People were having more fun than they've had in this game in a long time. Now, you've nerfed the exp so hard, doffing is better exp than being social with leveling. My friends list is cut down to the usually 8-10 people who haven't joined the rest in leaving. Perhaps this is time you guys step up and realize what you're labeling as an exploit has turned into the most enjoyable game time people have had in years, and would benefit you to exploit it as much as we apparently have.
QFT !
+1
/10char
Would you recommend STO to a friend?
"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."
The only real thing is that Cryptic admits they have released bugged content, so did not playtest proper, or read the tribble feedback etc.
And the sentence "I hope you all have a wonderful weekend." at the end of the first post, feels very sarcastic to me. No I don't have a good weekend after all that has been done.
So, first up: None of my characters were affected. I hadn't bothered with leveling yet since I was more interested in wandering about the new Episodes. I have next to no interest in the queues, thanks to the decreased rewards, and am instead wandering about the new Episodes and Adventure Zone. So far, not a single one of my characters is level 60, and I'm fine with that for now.
That said... has it occurred to anyone making these decisions that it might not be the XP awards from defeating NPCs that was the problem, but rather the unbelievably slow rate of progression overall? I don't begrudge the progress of those players that decided to grind like an Orion on Nerve Tonic... they chose to use the best available means of progression along a path that spans an added 60 levels worth of XP. Of that 110 total levels worth of XP, only the first 60 are factored into scaling... right there is the source of balancing problems for the queues and "exploits" where players are trying to level using the best means of progression available; maybe allowing for progression comparable to pre-DR would be a better solution than leaving us bored and grinding whatever next-best option we can find, eh?
The new Episodes are solid and the Kobali Adventure Zone is decent... though poorly synced with the Klingon faction; maybe you could at least frame the Kobali as a second chance at Sto'vo'kor for Warriors that fail to die in battle? That they choose to honor the dead in a different manner does not mean that they cannot be shown to have honor. Oh, and yes Captain Kim, just because we like them better does in fact mean that my Nausicaan gets to decide who lives and who dies. He does that a lot, often by his own hand... he's even got the Kill Accolades to prove it.
After that... the queues simply take longer, relying on DPS and to a lesser extent CC... and nothing else. The rewards certainly aren't on par with what's necessary to complete them, nor the preparation that goes into Advanced or Elite. *Sigh*
Look, I understand that you've got a vision for this whole thing... but try to remember that you're making a game. You advertised raising the level cap by 10... okay, then why do we have to grind 60 additional levels worth of XP, at a slower rate than pre-DR? You advertised the Difficulty changes with Advanced being a slightly adjusted version of the pre-DR Elites... okay, why are the NPC hitpoints (far) more than doubled and the dilithium halved, when neither "double" nor "half" qualify as "slight" adjustments? You advertised that our T5 ships wouldn't be obsolete... okay, why do we have to pay to keep them relevant, and if we're paying why aren't they actually Upgraded to T6?
In the end, your focus appears to be on making the game take longer rather than making it more fun, and that seems misplaced. I apologize if I'm misinterpreting the design decisions of late, but that's what it looks like from where I'm sitting. You can keep the over-level dilithium, but give us an enjoyable rate of progression.
...
To heck with it, just read dontdrunkimshoot's post. That is indicative of what you don't want players thinking when they look at a game. It is also what many players are thinking when they look at the changes of late. Remember too... dontdrunk has been about for awhile. Now imagine what this grind looks like to someone not accustomed to it and not already geared up for it. Those someones are your prospective new players, that bring new money and make foolish purchases because they don't know any better... coax them in, don't scare them off. Please?
Usually Alternate Advancement is a great idea and the rewards minor but for some reason they made it so that you hardly get anything from leveling up to 60 and all the good stuff comes after that. No wonder people were grinding like crazy.
Just so. If the Specialization Points had been granted for levels 16+, every level 60 character would have had the ability to fill one Primary and one Secondary Specialization... which would have made the level-based scaling more accurate and kept the over-level progression horizontal in nature. This is not what was done, however, so we instead have ridiculous amounts of XP grinding ahead of us and poor scaling for level 60 queues.
The "exploit" was not the problem, the flawed design is. Look to that, please.
You should've banned them all for life. Every single one. And all the rioters on the forums too. Get rid of them all in one fell swoop!!
You would make the worst game developer, ever. Probably wouldn't be able to get a game out of Beta.
"Ban them all! Hey, why is no one playing my game?" :rolleyes:
PGI tried that... look what happened
The problem still remains though that you really need to try harder at knowing what happens in your game and really Q&A it not just 'fix it if it breaks the game' or for the love of Star Trek "LISTEN TO YOUR COMMUNITY!" People tell you these things way in advance of launch on holodeck and yet it gets pushed out the door. It's funny that it wasn't a priority/time to fix before launch but you can immediately take swift action after and deal with the drama that ensues after.
Just try to take on board and learn lessons and you might just start winning the community back again.
Guess it was. :P Link is invalid.
Dev incoming with the nerf bat from hek
system Lord Baal is dead
Not very smart thing to do.
Because players who spend the most money obviously are the most disappointed in the actions Cryptic took, like tampering with the their toons, taking specialization points away etc. People who don't spend money on this game in the first place, just play what they enjoy and stop playing when they don't, they loose nothing because they invested nothing.
People who spend the most money on this game are mostly of a more impatient nature don't enjoy grinding for month, thats why they spend money to get things faster instead.
So swooping them as you say, whould even remove many more cash paying players, then they loose now due to the naming and shaming of the player community, calling them exploiters, punish players for cryptics mistakes like: bad release management, lacking bug tracing and lack to listen to player feedback, even closing forum topics instead of understanding the message.
If realy only a small group of people had such a big advantage as cryptic claims, why bothering. Just fix the bugs, improve release managment instead of spending lots of effort on screening all players playing logs and such.
It's never a smart thing to bite the hand that feeds you. Instead of admitting mistakes and making excusses to the player community Cryptic is putting effort in fighting the symptoms, not root causes, of the things they caused themselves in the first place.
This is very clear for most people.
People who cheat? Sure; ban em! Except the 'exploit' here was all in the devs' heads, as the result of gravely failing to take personal responsibility for having messed up their XP loot tables. On Elite, NPC's would pay out 5x, instead of the apparently intended 2x (and that while Elite is definitely 2x as difficult). So, people like yours truly, not being at all surprised at Elite paying out a lot more, essentially got robbed, by Cryptic, for having played on Elite. That's it. That was the alleged '
Cryptic have been testing the expansion to StarTrek online for several months.
One problem was the XP being gained whilst a person was playing on the most difficult settings. it was set high so as allow people to level faster on the test server...
The company were aware of this, as they programmed it, However they sent the information to their live server. Players noticed this and word quickly spread. Players started power levelling using the elite settings as most were unaware that the figures were wrong. The development team then started wondering why their new maps were not being played and decided to make a rare appearance in game and started asking questions. It came to light that the system was "being abused" by a select few who were reaping rewards in the form of in game currency that you can buy with real money... There in lies the problem.
Rather than fix the problem and own up to what happened, they accused the players of exploiting the game. Then altered the player experience to reflect what they believed it should be.
This is very damaging to the trust of the player base. As a result they have pitted players against each other using the divide and conquer tactics and hoping that by burying their heads in the sand they can let the players shout it out between them whilst practising the norm of ignoring the customer base.
This is a process called deferred blame. Person A does something bad or wrong and person b blames person C with the knowledge it was A.
Despite the accusations Cryptic have offered no proof. I know of several individuals who lost out and never abused the system yet got penalised. There are so many rattles on the floor that it is impossible to see how they all fitted in the one pram.
This company have stolen time and respect from the people who pay them...
What they should have done.....
Closed the loop holes and said sorry then moved on with the game.
But No... alienate the player base whilst allowing others to run in an area renowned for currency exploits..
Good move..... I have a lifetime membership of this game and have purchased many in game items, probably spent more than I should have.This stops now.....
I haven't done anything wrong and in the same vein so haven't a lot of other people, but we are all tarred with the Exploiters brush....
The real exploit here is of the players....
I am sure that when the game developers go shopping and receive back to much change they pocket it. It is usual policy when a company makes a mathematical error that the customer is not touched and is protected, procedures are then put in place to prevent further instances from happening....
Give the players back their experience and suck it up...
Your Software house made a boo-boo correct it and move on... but do not steal time from your player base
They say some people were leveling 17x faster then others in other areas. Without telling that those specific people do 17x more DPS then others in other areas.
Now they reduced XP but not the hitpoints required. So now leveling is faster on difficulty setting Normal then on Elite.
Last week Elite was INTENDED to pay out almost 5x as much XP... cause they where boosted by more then 5x the HP + Shields and resistance to go alone with... as well as weapon power ect.
There old metrics said Almost no one played on Elite... they didn't really expect people in a MMO might group up and tackle harder content as a group. The expected even the most hard core among us would still take at least a few weeks of grinding to start seeing the end of the Spec point grind.
The reality of course was people where hitting the end of there point grind at least a week early (some earlier I'm sure).
So this week they decided the easiest way to "fix it" to a level they felt was what they wanted goal wise (2-3 months for the average daily player to finish obviously) was to call "exploit" and adjust things. Cause no one wants to be arguing so hard that they look like they must be cheaters. We are all supposed to be quite now... cause obviously we should feel dirty and just take the changes and be happy we aren't all banned. lmao
Even the teaming changes that changed the matching lower level bonuses... I would say most of that was working as intended. It was added to the game on purpose at one point for a reason.
I am fine with them making some changes to the high end of what was possible... fine perhaps it was to easy to earn large amounts of XP playing in 5 man groups. What I don't appreciate however is being lied to... and told "this is an exploit" when they over correct the numbers. I would have much more appreciated an HONEST post... that said "Look guys" we wanted this to last at least a few weeks for even our most dedicated players and we realize we have XP rewards set way to high... so we are corrected them. I could have respected that post at least.
Going forward I hope the devs are watching there "metrics" and realizing that things are set way way to low at this point. It is now more efficient to simply grind normal mode in 5 man groups... even doing that its still over an hour per spec point. Honestly if Cryptic thinks many of there players are going to commit 60+ hours of play time (OPTIMAL play time... not normal missions those gaps would mean more like 100+ hours) to max ONE toon... when many players have previously tended to 5-6... well I won't finish the thought. They will see it in there metrics more and more people will simply stop logging in. Its way to tedious... where things are set now I think to max you spec with the story missiosn you would likely have to replay the entire chain 20x at least.
With 700 XP per Mission ~4200 Replays ...