A positive view of DR (please don't attack me too much)

ermaname

The new episodes had some nice twists and some tricky situations to deal with. Though the massive hp enemies were tough (and admittedly frustrating), it was good to not just warp in, attack and kill everything in a few shots, great to actually have a challenge and have to use skills, determination and patience to not just kill them, but survive their attacks. The massed patrol episodes make sense IMO, patrols are afterall mini missions and making up an episode through multiple mini missions is fine by me.

Kobali ground, well, I love ground rep areas, and the fun of actually making it solo to the end and having new enemy types that have previously been almost overlooked was great I now live here between pves.

New pves? I've struggled with some, but they are endgame and I'm not finished yet, but the new queues I have done are fun and interesting.

When I 1st saw what R&D and upgrading would involve, I almost rage quit, but after not spending any real money on it and just using a small amount of dilithium I am level 15 in one school and close to 15 between 4 characters for all schools. Having saved up dilithium since the anouncement of DR I am now halfway to upgrading my space setup to epic xiv with my main character (who is my only focus atm).

Personally I have not seen any decline in numbers of players, instances, nor increase in waiting times for pve queues.

On the game being a grindfest... wasn't it already? Aren't all MMOs? Accolades for 1000 runs of this and 1000 kills of that?

How the admins dealt with Tau Dewa Gate was terrible, the way some bugs (skill tray *shakes fist at the sky*) have not been fixed is a major issue, but overall I still love this game, the ingame community I am part of, the content updates on a regular basis, the events, both in and outside of game, the ability to access any content with determination, patience and hard work (ok you need to pay to get vet rewards, but vet rewards are for people that love the game so much they want to pledge their support, through LTS or gold subbing).

BTW, I may be free to play, but I have spent several thousand £s on this game over the past 3 years and intend to keep spending.

Half tempted to write TLDR myself, but meh, worth a try to have my say.

apsciliara

Good to see that not everybody is filled with rage on these forums! I totally agree, I've actually really enjoyed Delta Rising so far. Looking forward to more story expansions in future

cheesebasket

*Pops party amplifier and leaves* xD

ladymyajha

ermaname wrote: »

On the game being a grindfest... wasn't it already? Aren't all MMOs? Accolades for 1000 runs of this and 1000 kills of that?.

I'm going to address this one only personally. All games are a grind fest... to a degree... but also most games anymore have a smooth story progression up to basically end game, then you grind end game.

What Cryptic did was cause you to grind just to get to see the story. Nothing smooth about it. What they should have done was simply put in the quests all together, moved the cap to 60, but even if they stopped the story at 55 or so, they simply could say that future story would move you closer to the level cap.

So instead it became a grind just to see the story, then on top of the excessive grind and time gating that STO already is, it's just too much grind in way to many people's eyes.

Simply put, the arguement "there's no rush" kind of falls flat when people simply want to see the storyline, and they have to wait and grind and grind just to see it.

mandarsmash

Good on you for saying something positive without demeaning others' opinions.

I agree. DR has been largely enjoyable, and I believe there is a lot of promise in the underlying systems of ship Masteriers and Specialization points.

The bugs and how long they take to get fixed I almost expect now. That's not a good thing, but it is less disconcerting than the decisions made regarding PvE queues and how the exploit was handled.

If a) new Elite was just tacked on as a higher difficulty and old Elite just became Advanced straight; and b) they had closed the exploit and left people's Specialization points alone, I think there would be a lot more happy people.

It's become a pile-on of negativity because of these decisions, and people have been finding issue with things that they likely would have tolerated if it weren't for these decisions. Players are feeling unduly punished, and it's hard to look past that.

But if you do look past that, there's a lot of good and fun stuff in DR. There were always going to be growing pains. It's just that some things got out of hand and then made worse.

janus1975

Well yes, some of it was okay and if would have been fine. For me the biggest issues (which I won't go into) are not irreversible, but there's a certain level of disappointment that the hype have led to unmet expectations.

If DR wasn't hyped up so much, and they'd spent a bit more time on "polishing" (e.g. patrol missions as "exploration" would have been great if done as a sidebar mission like it was for the release of Tau Dewa), and had done more Puzzle missions, and maybe added some snazzy little "Career Specific" objectives like in the very early missions, it would have been fine.

Maybe once some of the more ridiculous issues are dealt with by Cryptic and the smoke clears, everyone will have a much better look at DR

councilspectre

Well said. I completely agree with most of that.

I enjoy the game quite a bit and am very pleased with the new additions. One of the things I love about STO is that there is so much to do. You could spend all of your time in one aspect of the game and then switch around to others and not run out.

It's very complex and fun, not to mention you can create your own missions that others can play. Don't see that everywhere.

It's free, but I spend money on it.

futurepastnow

Eh, all the Delta Quadrant stuff is nice. The new queues are fun, except Battle of Korfez needs some of the bugs worked out of it. There's some good stuff in the Delta rep. The specialization system is ok aside from the silly 52k XP needed for each point and how annoying that is to get.

The level cap raise was unnecessary. The normal/advanced difficulty scaling was unnecessary. The reduction of STF rewards is really terrible. The capricious actions taken against players who- gasp- managed to level faster than expected is simply indefensible. And the upgrade system is the worst, most blatant attempt to milk players yet.