We've been screaming at the tops of our collective lungs for weeks. The Devs don't care. They're too busy doing petty vindictive things like stealing Spec points and banning anyone with a character named "Gecko".
True, true BUT in my case I notice only full fleet rosters due of those type of player who usually pop up when new stuff is released before being gone again for a few moths enjoying other games till anything new happens in STO. I really hope they are not too disappointed by recent changes in endgame.
Even more true and a foreseeable big problem. From my observation those players who are regularly on even between the season start about to leave. I mean all those committed players investing time and/or money on the game on a regular basis.
Right guys, and I do expect things to calm down within a few weeks. I know some are a little miffed at upgrade costs etc.
It was also like this when LOR launched as well, new stuff people want to check out. So I'm sure in a few weks things will get really quiet again.
And many in the fleet are giving up on creating and maintaining new toons/alts, due to the workload required.
So that can't be a good thing.
I have 5 toons - 1 kdf, 1 rom, 3 feds tac, engi, sci.
Only my main (Fed Sci) has been getting anything done, I just feel like its too much work to keep up with the others at this point.
I may work on them later, when my main is fully leveled (60) and has R&D at 15 in all catagories. (Thing is that may be a while R&D is super grindy)
I have 5 toons - 1 kdf, 1 rom, 3 feds tac, engi, sci.
Only my main (Fed Sci) has been getting anything done, I just feel like its too much work to keep up with the others at this point.
I'm working on just one captain right now and I'm going to keep it to three, at most, one tac, one eng, one sci, with tac and eng in Risian ships and sci in the event Dyson ship.
The only reps I'll get gear from will be the ones that get the currencies from outside of queues. I'm still deciding if even that will be worth it, grind the dil to get the mk XII, then grind more dil to get it to mk XIII, then to mk XIV, pray I really like that setup and don't want to change damage types...
I used to like having lots of captains around, especially with the commendation tokens taking a rep down to 20 days. Hit 50, get geared up and ready to roll in a few weeks, have fun, make a new captain, repeat. Now, just one captain and endless patrolling is making it hard to log in to do much beyond clicking my R+D buttons so that in a year I'll have it at useful levels. (though I won't have the Advanced+ queue-only mats to actually make anything)
This is my Risian Corvette. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
We've been screaming at the tops of our collective lungs for weeks. The Devs don't care. [..]
No doubt....
For what it is worth, love your sig image! Bagdad Bob!! He was double dipped in awesome sauce! :cool: A true professional PR man.
Anyway, I tried to convert one of my MX12 Purple cons into an epic today. I spent several million on tech upgrades and nearly 40k dilith before I gave up. :eek:
I believe if the system is not changed to reduce those asinine gambling costs soon many hardcore people will simply leave. The gamble on the keys is bad enough and now the only way to get a top-end epic is to gamble more than the damn keys costs for a ship!!!! Someone really jumped the shark on those metrics.... :mad:
If you are looking for an excellent PvE fleet consider: Omega Combat Division today.
Former member of the Cryptic Family & FriendsTesting Team. Sadly, one day, it simply vanished - without a word or trace...
In regards to the F2P model, I think it's a good model but it's based on the premise of people using that model in a way that doesn't become bent by greed, misunderstanding of the concept or even just pure stupidity.
Now STO's model was good, but the gameplay has to go hand-in-hand with the model, and if you make the gameplay too grind heavy it can in itself push the F2P model out the window. I think what I'm trying to say is that everyone has to be able to remain competitive which was possible before now, but not any more.
Just to add, because I think someone mentioned about Cryptic having meetings by now if they were trying to fix this. In all honesty if you look at the Steam Stats for number of people playing this 'expansion' is nosediving. For anyone interested: http://steamcharts.com/app/9900#All
Truth is I think this game is likely just going to get given up on. It'll be interesting to see the financials for this quarter but in all honesty I can't imagine them being good. Certainly isn't their most successful expansion ever like they've been trying to claim.
I am gonna spend time watching this video as I continue catching up on the forums.
~CaptainSmirk
If I may be so bold. Would you also catch up on closed threads? They tend to be buried very fast. Especially the ones related to the specialisation points incident. I'm not asking for miracles, just to read them.
I was very excited about this expansion coming out, it was all I could do not to jump around the place squealing like a little kid on Christmas Eve... Yet here we are, two weeks after release, and not only am I bored of the expansion but they've killed my interest in the game.
Over the last four years I've clocked over 3,000 hours of game time. I've ranked up 14 characters. Purchased most of the ships, costumes, pets, etc, etc. But now I just don't even want to login. There's nothing for me to do. I'm not a 20K DPS player, I only do an average 8K DPS. I like to play for the Star Trek universe more than anything, but now I don't do nearly enough damage to play the content I used to enjoy. This last week I've logged in and actually found myself sitting there on ESD doing absolutely nothing for an hour before deciding that I just really don't want to even play, then logged out.
It sucks, I miss the game I used to love.
Join date is wrong, I've actually been around since STO Beta.
True alters don't have a "main". Account wide unlocks for all unique event rewards!!
To add to the OP another paradox involves rep gear, sure you can get marks from normal quest but you can't get the special item (example ancient power cells) unless you do advance queues with is very difficult for a fresh captain unless your lucky in a pug. You could tell me to buy fleet gear but nobody wants to use dil for the projects, oh just upgrade your gear, nope not enough Dil.
From the forums the exp was a "mistake" so it was lowered, but to many it just felt right but now this long deranged grinding to just level up is just horrible. Since you took away the Dil reward for maxing your trees why make it so painful to level up? the only idea I can think of is that you wanted the new story to last longer but if it takes someone a few days to play the next mission how can we really enjoy it and that is a real shame because I really did enjoy the story.
Here is a suggestion how about adding a new another difficulty between normal and advance and put the "difficulty" in the middle that rewards the queues special item so people can get end game gear. Also make the time limits ones optional and is part of the high failure rate of some of the adv quests fail
Next increase DIL 240 and 480 really? It cost over 18k to upgrade one item. most peoples build can't handle advance queues to get 480 Dil so 8K divide by 240=34 quest to max out refine cap for one day. So here is a list of common uses for Dil. equipment upgrades, rep equipment projects, fleet projects, fleet proviosional projects, items from Dil store and Dil to Zen.
The end game content is very new captain unfriendly, once you hit level 50 everything becomes harder and more aggravating just to level up. A large number of my fleet mates have stop playing in the last week waiting to see if it gets better because at over 300 people only 4 are level 60 and that is only because we played a lot in the first few days.
I set a challange to the Cryptic team for a understanding on how the players feel about the game:
make a new chaectar and level to 60 and be able to be able to complete Adv queses and to actually help instead of relying on expert teams.
Rules:
1. no dev modding (you can not use any thing a normal player doesn't have so no increase money or infinite health. , or adding c-store ship)
2. you can choose 1 c-store ship at level 50 (your only c-store purchase)
3. any one at cryptic can play the captain
4. must be on the holodeck sever
5. have a meeting to discuss the game and you must consider multiple people are playing on one captain. so if five people are tired of grinding on one captain consider how it is for one person with five captains.
Reasoning behind challenge: people can tell you what they don't like but everyone has a different opionin someone with a 80k dps ship will have an easier time with everything even on elite then a new captain that just hit 50 but most people don't have an 80k dps ship and now it is even harder to get and more needed.
OP, you've done a very good video--reasonable, no screaming ad ranting, just good solid constructive criticism from both a systems and communications standpoint.
My only area of disagreement with you is that I sincerely believe Cryptic was correct that there was a real and serious exploit BEYOND the Tau Dewa patrols. There are ways for that to be true and I heard something in Zone suggesting it really was. I wish I could discuss what I heard but if you sniff around you might be able to find out about the same suspicions on your own.
Where Cryptic went wrong was in an arbitrary and draconian solution to the problem that appears to have caught up a lot of people who were not involved in what I suspect to have been some serious TOS-breaking stuff. And communicating it late and badly.
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.
OP, you've done a very good video--reasonable, no screaming ad ranting, just good solid constructive criticism from both a systems and communications standpoint.
yeah, him being apparently annoyed but speaking calmly at the same time
impressed me very much.
something i'll never manage to pull off.
Ouch...did not mean to say "screaming ad ranting." I meant "screaming AND ranting."
Sheesh, five minutes to typo-check my posts and I STILL end up posting stuff like that. O_o
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.
Can we talk about the forums too? This latest move with the 300 seconds, that's just... no words for it.
I dunno.
I think that I would like some word from the devs to make clear whether this is temporary and what the rationale behind it was.
On one hand I can see why it is upsetting people. On the other hand...I dunno, I think that there has been some stuff from a small subset of posters (no, I will NOT name and shame, sorry) that has been over the line in more than one way, and the mods and community managers combined may not be able to handle the workload.
But what I AM seeing here, clearly, is a failure to give prior warning and fully communicate rationale before making a change that has an impact on how people participate in the community.
Another illustration of what the OP said about communication.
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.
I think that I would like some word from the devs to make clear whether this is temporary and what the rationale behind it was.
On one hand I can see why it is upsetting people. On the other hand...I dunno, I think that there has been some stuff from a small subset of posters (no, I will NOT name and shame, sorry) that has been over the line in more than one way, and the mods and community managers combined may not be able to handle the workload.
But what I AM seeing here, clearly, is a failure to give prior warning and fully communicate rationale before making a change that has an impact on how people participate in the community.
Another illustration of what the OP said about communication.
Although to be fair, a developer did explain, awhile after the fact why they locked down an entire sector block so maybe they'll tell us, awhile later after the inferno on this forum reaches fusion. Although judging by the replies... I think it's close to fusion!
I think that I would like some word from the devs to make clear whether this is temporary and what the rationale behind it was.
On one hand I can see why it is upsetting people. On the other hand...I dunno, I think that there has been some stuff from a small subset of posters (no, I will NOT name and shame, sorry) that has been over the line in more than one way, and the mods and community managers combined may not be able to handle the workload.
But what I AM seeing here, clearly, is a failure to give prior warning and fully communicate rationale before making a change that has an impact on how people participate in the community.
Another illustration of what the OP said about communication.
Yeah, I'm also reserving full comment until we get official word... but that's just the thing, there should have been official word no later than minutes after this change. I do believe it is quite intentional, and I have some theories. Yes, they're pessimistic, but they're realistic given the situation over the past week.
My first theory is that they simply want to stifle players so as to stop the negativity. Of course, just like upping NPC health does not equal difficulty, putting a timer on posting does not equal less negativity from something they caused.
If it is because of a select few posters, I say that they need to grow a backbone and do some real moderation on those select few posters.
I honestly do not believe that there is a good reason behind the post time limit. At best it will probably turn out to be a "Not a terrible reason... but not a good reason by any means."
Another illustration of what the OP said about communication.
It is slightly ironic that they would chose to prove one of his very valid concerns within hours of him posting it.
Optimistic Thought: It's something silly like a bot infestation so they've set a higher timer until they can kill them all.
Realist Thought: It's really a crud move, just because a large amount of people aren't happy with DR and are filling the forums faster than they can close threads.
Join date is wrong, I've actually been around since STO Beta.
True alters don't have a "main". Account wide unlocks for all unique event rewards!!
I'm confused as to why leveling maximum gear to play the end content is problematic - perhaps I need more understanding of the perspective. If you don't read whatever else I type, read this: This game has the pros/cons of F2P & MMO models. I think many Trek fans are here and stay out of IP love and Trek-withdrawal and not necessarily the draw of MMORPGs, which can get messy when trying to voice complaints about a lot of the things happening. Give a listen to Dev interviews on podcasts and websites for some insight.
I agree that more dilithium is necessary given the increase in dilithium sinks introduced, but as far as the specializtion points go...you dont NEED them to play the end stuff although they help. Eventually, through typical play, you'll accidentally earn all of the points needed for the all of the specialization skills.
As far as the increase in Zen for the next tier ships, it follows suit. We increased 10 levels (2 ranks), and with that we have ships that match. So if anything, a 500zen increase in cost should have been expected. Also, Legacy of Romulus was called an expansion by the developers, so just because folks don't consider it one doesn't mean that it isn't.
Lastly, it was an exploit. It is what it is. My impression from the EP's post was that the company did acknowledge it was a bug, and the people that took advantage of the system because it wasn't working as intended - which is exploiting. People were getting a reported 17x the XP they should have. I don't get why this is an issue. From my understanding 1 mission =/= 1 level was how the game was at launch; I came in at F2P launch so I didn't experience that. My opinion of the sector patrol XP grind is that it isn't that bad and is pacing well in my experience. What could greatly improve the experience is the introduction of exploring sectors on patrols requiring us to solve puzzles or investigate things in a non-combative way, just for variety. Gimme that!
Know this, I don't agree with everything they are doing, but a lot of this complaining that is going on seems to come from an entitled stand point whether or not it's intended to sound that way.
Realist Thought: It's really a crud move, just because a large amount of people aren't happy with DR and are filling the forums faster than they can close threads.
Yeah...I suspect that's what it is: to bring the post rate down so that the mods can keep up.
It does, however, have a bad chilling effect, and the way it was introduced--like everything else--with zero warning and explanation, is a VERY poor move and is showing me that thus far Cryptic is not learning from its mistakes.
I hope Smirk does get the time to watch the OP's video soon and that it gets passed up the chain. This needs to be seen all the way up to the top.
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.
Yeah...I suspect that's what it is: to bring the post rate down so that the mods can keep up.
It does, however, have a bad chilling effect, and the way it was introduced--like everything else--with zero warning and explanation, is a VERY poor move and is showing me that thus far Cryptic is not learning from its mistakes.
I hope Smirk does get the time to watch the OP's video soon and that it gets passed up the chain. This needs to be seen all the way up to the top.
Yeah, with their awful track record for keeping players informed, I wouldn't be surprised that if the game shuts down (happens to most MMOs eventually) the first sign will be that the servers and forums are inaccessible. Then maybe a week or two later we'll get an email saying "Thanks for your understanding... and all that money you dropped on Zen the day before we shut the servers down".
Join date is wrong, I've actually been around since STO Beta.
True alters don't have a "main". Account wide unlocks for all unique event rewards!!
namreef there's a lot of insight from a relatively naive viewpoint in your post (note naivety isn't a bad thing ).
Firstly what they have done with the expansion seems to some to be incredibly subtle, to those who have a good working knowledge of game mechanics and maths it's a club to the face.
When you reduce the rewards for a scenario in an MMO, people will get annoyed, it's just simple social reaction to having something taken away that has been a constant for a long time. However combine that with a increase in time to get a lower reward for an action and it snowballs the Time part of the Time vs Reward ratio. Up to the point where earning the 480 Dil from an Advanced Queue takes upwards of 4x the time for half the reward, effectively making it take 16x as long for the old reward of 960 Dil for the same action prior to DR.
The pricing of 500 Zen per ship tier is also up the creek. Mainly because it doesn't equate to the power of the ship or the potential reward of the ship itself. During Ship sale weekends you can get the full Scimitar set for 4000 Zen, arguably the most powerful ship in the game for ~$40, or just the Scimitar variant for 2000 zen or ~$20. The issue with a fixed pricing mechanic like that is that it results in items (consoles) and ships that are overpriced, or even downright terrible in some cases when compared to other ships ingame whether purchasable or otherwise.
Similarly some of the services and boosters are massively overpriced for the ingame result. Ironically they would make far more money if they just re-evaluated pricing vs reward on all their products. If there's an Epic grade skin fair enough give it a bit of a premium, but not to the point it makes it impossible for people to consider affording.
On the subject of the exploit, the EP made a lot of mistakes in that public announcement. First up was the 17x fact. If he can post the proof of it, then fine, until then it's just a claim and conjecture. This is mainly because we can't comprehend what baseline he's using for the 17x Exp gain. The fastest someone could have been leveling with boosting is around 7x according to EXP gain, but with the bug of using a low level to reduce the health of the enemies it would increase XP gain per minute possibly resulting in the Exp gain mentioned, even then that's a bug easily fixed, no need to go ape **** on everyone for it. Not only is it a bug easily fixed it's a bug they caused, were notified of, and failed to fix prior to release.
The second failure of the EP's claims is that they globally applied a blanket reduction on Exp from people who levelled faster than their metrics. People who didn't venture into TD to use the patrols, or used them to get Rom Marks as per usual were hit. People who levelled in other areas like DS9 and so on got hit. High DPS players who can steam roll any content were hit, all because they didn't target the actual exploiters as per their claims.
I've listened to the Dev's on podcasts, I've done a lot of research and played many MMO's and other game types. The balance in game is currently very wrong. The closest you can relate it too now are the very grindy Korean/Chinese MMO's where progression/reward are heavily skewed in the favour of the Publisher, with the player getting very little out of the time spent playing. If the game engine was up to the standards of say Unreal or CryEngine for ground movement and space movement (even with the psuedo 3D movement in space) then it would be different, instead the game feels cheap, the ground combat and space combat both happen in a very short space of time, making ground power activation and duration mostly pointless, whereas Space combat can chain powers to make ships do over 70K DPS compared to a normally played ship doing between 2-5K DPS.
The imbalances, the engine and the reactions from the Dev's are now conspiring against the players for a meaningful Reward given the Time played. In turn players are less inclined to grind and grind and grind through 600 repeat patrols to reach 60.
Oh don't forget that normal mode now gives more EXP vs Time than Elite level does. Elite has a 5x health buff for NPC's, which in turn requires 5x the time to defeat, but only gives 2x the EXP of normal. Whereas pre-Nerfbat they gave 5x the Exp. Which would make that equation correct. The only bug that was present was actually present despite the claims of the EP was the downlevelling bug which capped the enemies at lvl 50 instead of raising them to match the combined average of the group or matching the highest level in the group. Something that is a direct bug from the level matching mechanic and not at all the players fault, especially after reports were filed BEFORE the release of DR.
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."
Adorenko, before you do, keep an eye out for the thread I am about to make on the matter. You may find it interesting.
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.
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.
Yeah, with their awful track record for keeping players informed, I wouldn't be surprised that if the game shuts down (happens to most MMOs eventually) the first sign will be that the servers and forums are inaccessible. Then maybe a week or two later we'll get an email saying "Thanks for your understanding... and all that money you dropped on Zen the day before we shut the servers down".
So probably best to keep players from keeping other players informed is best from their vantage point.
And if they do shut down it will probably be after the winter Lifetime sale.
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Right guys, and I do expect things to calm down within a few weeks. I know some are a little miffed at upgrade costs etc.
It was also like this when LOR launched as well, new stuff people want to check out. So I'm sure in a few weks things will get really quiet again.
So that can't be a good thing.
I have 5 toons - 1 kdf, 1 rom, 3 feds tac, engi, sci.
Only my main (Fed Sci) has been getting anything done, I just feel like its too much work to keep up with the others at this point.
I may work on them later, when my main is fully leveled (60) and has R&D at 15 in all catagories. (Thing is that may be a while R&D is super grindy)
dont count on it
system Lord Baal is dead
I'm working on just one captain right now and I'm going to keep it to three, at most, one tac, one eng, one sci, with tac and eng in Risian ships and sci in the event Dyson ship.
The only reps I'll get gear from will be the ones that get the currencies from outside of queues. I'm still deciding if even that will be worth it, grind the dil to get the mk XII, then grind more dil to get it to mk XIII, then to mk XIV, pray I really like that setup and don't want to change damage types...
I used to like having lots of captains around, especially with the commendation tokens taking a rep down to 20 days. Hit 50, get geared up and ready to roll in a few weeks, have fun, make a new captain, repeat. Now, just one captain and endless patrolling is making it hard to log in to do much beyond clicking my R+D buttons so that in a year I'll have it at useful levels. (though I won't have the Advanced+ queue-only mats to actually make anything)
For what it is worth, love your sig image! Bagdad Bob!! He was double dipped in awesome sauce! :cool: A true professional PR man.
Anyway, I tried to convert one of my MX12 Purple cons into an epic today. I spent several million on tech upgrades and nearly 40k dilith before I gave up. :eek:
I believe if the system is not changed to reduce those asinine gambling costs soon many hardcore people will simply leave. The gamble on the keys is bad enough and now the only way to get a top-end epic is to gamble more than the damn keys costs for a ship!!!! Someone really jumped the shark on those metrics.... :mad:
ingame: @.Spartan
Original Cryptic Forum Name: Spartan (member #124)
The Glorious, Kirk’s Protegè
My character Tsin'xing
OHH I would love to see Angry Joe do another review of STO now!!
[SIGPIC]Click here to visit my STO YouTube channel[/SIGPIC]
~CaptainSmirk
If I may be so bold. Would you also catch up on closed threads? They tend to be buried very fast. Especially the ones related to the specialisation points incident. I'm not asking for miracles, just to read them.
On behalf of quite a few players, Thank you.
sig
http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/5451/om71.jpg
It is a peculiar phenomenon that we can imagine events that defy the laws of the universe.
Over the last four years I've clocked over 3,000 hours of game time. I've ranked up 14 characters. Purchased most of the ships, costumes, pets, etc, etc. But now I just don't even want to login. There's nothing for me to do. I'm not a 20K DPS player, I only do an average 8K DPS. I like to play for the Star Trek universe more than anything, but now I don't do nearly enough damage to play the content I used to enjoy. This last week I've logged in and actually found myself sitting there on ESD doing absolutely nothing for an hour before deciding that I just really don't want to even play, then logged out.
It sucks, I miss the game I used to love.
From the forums the exp was a "mistake" so it was lowered, but to many it just felt right but now this long deranged grinding to just level up is just horrible. Since you took away the Dil reward for maxing your trees why make it so painful to level up? the only idea I can think of is that you wanted the new story to last longer but if it takes someone a few days to play the next mission how can we really enjoy it and that is a real shame because I really did enjoy the story.
Here is a suggestion how about adding a new another difficulty between normal and advance and put the "difficulty" in the middle that rewards the queues special item so people can get end game gear. Also make the time limits ones optional and is part of the high failure rate of some of the adv quests fail
Next increase DIL 240 and 480 really? It cost over 18k to upgrade one item. most peoples build can't handle advance queues to get 480 Dil so 8K divide by 240=34 quest to max out refine cap for one day. So here is a list of common uses for Dil. equipment upgrades, rep equipment projects, fleet projects, fleet proviosional projects, items from Dil store and Dil to Zen.
The end game content is very new captain unfriendly, once you hit level 50 everything becomes harder and more aggravating just to level up. A large number of my fleet mates have stop playing in the last week waiting to see if it gets better because at over 300 people only 4 are level 60 and that is only because we played a lot in the first few days.
============================================================
I set a challange to the Cryptic team for a understanding on how the players feel about the game:
make a new chaectar and level to 60 and be able to be able to complete Adv queses and to actually help instead of relying on expert teams.
Rules:
1. no dev modding (you can not use any thing a normal player doesn't have so no increase money or infinite health. , or adding c-store ship)
2. you can choose 1 c-store ship at level 50 (your only c-store purchase)
3. any one at cryptic can play the captain
4. must be on the holodeck sever
5. have a meeting to discuss the game and you must consider multiple people are playing on one captain. so if five people are tired of grinding on one captain consider how it is for one person with five captains.
Reasoning behind challenge: people can tell you what they don't like but everyone has a different opionin someone with a 80k dps ship will have an easier time with everything even on elite then a new captain that just hit 50 but most people don't have an 80k dps ship and now it is even harder to get and more needed.
My only area of disagreement with you is that I sincerely believe Cryptic was correct that there was a real and serious exploit BEYOND the Tau Dewa patrols. There are ways for that to be true and I heard something in Zone suggesting it really was. I wish I could discuss what I heard but if you sniff around you might be able to find out about the same suspicions on your own.
Where Cryptic went wrong was in an arbitrary and draconian solution to the problem that appears to have caught up a lot of people who were not involved in what I suspect to have been some serious TOS-breaking stuff. And communicating it late and badly.
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yeah, him being apparently annoyed but speaking calmly at the same time
impressed me very much.
something i'll never manage to pull off.
good video op.
Sheesh, five minutes to typo-check my posts and I STILL end up posting stuff like that. O_o
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I dunno.
I think that I would like some word from the devs to make clear whether this is temporary and what the rationale behind it was.
On one hand I can see why it is upsetting people. On the other hand...I dunno, I think that there has been some stuff from a small subset of posters (no, I will NOT name and shame, sorry) that has been over the line in more than one way, and the mods and community managers combined may not be able to handle the workload.
But what I AM seeing here, clearly, is a failure to give prior warning and fully communicate rationale before making a change that has an impact on how people participate in the community.
Another illustration of what the OP said about communication.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
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They tried to squelch the flames.
Apparently, propane canisters look a lot like fire extinguishers to Cryptic.
communications? Cryptic/PWE?
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
oh, you were serious?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhckuhUxcgA
Although to be fair, a developer did explain, awhile after the fact why they locked down an entire sector block so maybe they'll tell us, awhile later after the inferno on this forum reaches fusion. Although judging by the replies... I think it's close to fusion!
Yeah, I'm also reserving full comment until we get official word... but that's just the thing, there should have been official word no later than minutes after this change. I do believe it is quite intentional, and I have some theories. Yes, they're pessimistic, but they're realistic given the situation over the past week.
My first theory is that they simply want to stifle players so as to stop the negativity. Of course, just like upping NPC health does not equal difficulty, putting a timer on posting does not equal less negativity from something they caused.
If it is because of a select few posters, I say that they need to grow a backbone and do some real moderation on those select few posters.
I honestly do not believe that there is a good reason behind the post time limit. At best it will probably turn out to be a "Not a terrible reason... but not a good reason by any means."
It is slightly ironic that they would chose to prove one of his very valid concerns within hours of him posting it.
Optimistic Thought: It's something silly like a bot infestation so they've set a higher timer until they can kill them all.
Realist Thought: It's really a crud move, just because a large amount of people aren't happy with DR and are filling the forums faster than they can close threads.
I agree that more dilithium is necessary given the increase in dilithium sinks introduced, but as far as the specializtion points go...you dont NEED them to play the end stuff although they help. Eventually, through typical play, you'll accidentally earn all of the points needed for the all of the specialization skills.
As far as the increase in Zen for the next tier ships, it follows suit. We increased 10 levels (2 ranks), and with that we have ships that match. So if anything, a 500zen increase in cost should have been expected. Also, Legacy of Romulus was called an expansion by the developers, so just because folks don't consider it one doesn't mean that it isn't.
Lastly, it was an exploit. It is what it is. My impression from the EP's post was that the company did acknowledge it was a bug, and the people that took advantage of the system because it wasn't working as intended - which is exploiting. People were getting a reported 17x the XP they should have. I don't get why this is an issue. From my understanding 1 mission =/= 1 level was how the game was at launch; I came in at F2P launch so I didn't experience that. My opinion of the sector patrol XP grind is that it isn't that bad and is pacing well in my experience. What could greatly improve the experience is the introduction of exploring sectors on patrols requiring us to solve puzzles or investigate things in a non-combative way, just for variety. Gimme that!
Know this, I don't agree with everything they are doing, but a lot of this complaining that is going on seems to come from an entitled stand point whether or not it's intended to sound that way.
Yeah...I suspect that's what it is: to bring the post rate down so that the mods can keep up.
It does, however, have a bad chilling effect, and the way it was introduced--like everything else--with zero warning and explanation, is a VERY poor move and is showing me that thus far Cryptic is not learning from its mistakes.
I hope Smirk does get the time to watch the OP's video soon and that it gets passed up the chain. This needs to be seen all the way up to the top.
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Yeah, with their awful track record for keeping players informed, I wouldn't be surprised that if the game shuts down (happens to most MMOs eventually) the first sign will be that the servers and forums are inaccessible. Then maybe a week or two later we'll get an email saying "Thanks for your understanding... and all that money you dropped on Zen the day before we shut the servers down".
Firstly what they have done with the expansion seems to some to be incredibly subtle, to those who have a good working knowledge of game mechanics and maths it's a club to the face.
When you reduce the rewards for a scenario in an MMO, people will get annoyed, it's just simple social reaction to having something taken away that has been a constant for a long time. However combine that with a increase in time to get a lower reward for an action and it snowballs the Time part of the Time vs Reward ratio. Up to the point where earning the 480 Dil from an Advanced Queue takes upwards of 4x the time for half the reward, effectively making it take 16x as long for the old reward of 960 Dil for the same action prior to DR.
The pricing of 500 Zen per ship tier is also up the creek. Mainly because it doesn't equate to the power of the ship or the potential reward of the ship itself. During Ship sale weekends you can get the full Scimitar set for 4000 Zen, arguably the most powerful ship in the game for ~$40, or just the Scimitar variant for 2000 zen or ~$20. The issue with a fixed pricing mechanic like that is that it results in items (consoles) and ships that are overpriced, or even downright terrible in some cases when compared to other ships ingame whether purchasable or otherwise.
Similarly some of the services and boosters are massively overpriced for the ingame result. Ironically they would make far more money if they just re-evaluated pricing vs reward on all their products. If there's an Epic grade skin fair enough give it a bit of a premium, but not to the point it makes it impossible for people to consider affording.
On the subject of the exploit, the EP made a lot of mistakes in that public announcement. First up was the 17x fact. If he can post the proof of it, then fine, until then it's just a claim and conjecture. This is mainly because we can't comprehend what baseline he's using for the 17x Exp gain. The fastest someone could have been leveling with boosting is around 7x according to EXP gain, but with the bug of using a low level to reduce the health of the enemies it would increase XP gain per minute possibly resulting in the Exp gain mentioned, even then that's a bug easily fixed, no need to go ape **** on everyone for it. Not only is it a bug easily fixed it's a bug they caused, were notified of, and failed to fix prior to release.
The second failure of the EP's claims is that they globally applied a blanket reduction on Exp from people who levelled faster than their metrics. People who didn't venture into TD to use the patrols, or used them to get Rom Marks as per usual were hit. People who levelled in other areas like DS9 and so on got hit. High DPS players who can steam roll any content were hit, all because they didn't target the actual exploiters as per their claims.
I've listened to the Dev's on podcasts, I've done a lot of research and played many MMO's and other game types. The balance in game is currently very wrong. The closest you can relate it too now are the very grindy Korean/Chinese MMO's where progression/reward are heavily skewed in the favour of the Publisher, with the player getting very little out of the time spent playing. If the game engine was up to the standards of say Unreal or CryEngine for ground movement and space movement (even with the psuedo 3D movement in space) then it would be different, instead the game feels cheap, the ground combat and space combat both happen in a very short space of time, making ground power activation and duration mostly pointless, whereas Space combat can chain powers to make ships do over 70K DPS compared to a normally played ship doing between 2-5K DPS.
The imbalances, the engine and the reactions from the Dev's are now conspiring against the players for a meaningful Reward given the Time played. In turn players are less inclined to grind and grind and grind through 600 repeat patrols to reach 60.
Oh don't forget that normal mode now gives more EXP vs Time than Elite level does. Elite has a 5x health buff for NPC's, which in turn requires 5x the time to defeat, but only gives 2x the EXP of normal. Whereas pre-Nerfbat they gave 5x the Exp. Which would make that equation correct. The only bug that was present was actually present despite the claims of the EP was the downlevelling bug which capped the enemies at lvl 50 instead of raising them to match the combined average of the group or matching the highest level in the group. Something that is a direct bug from the level matching mechanic and not at all the players fault, especially after reports were filed BEFORE the release of DR.
"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 got some words for it...
I think I feel another video coming on, I don't know how much more speaking calmly I have left in me.
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http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1279061
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So probably best to keep players from keeping other players informed is best from their vantage point.
And if they do shut down it will probably be after the winter Lifetime sale.
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