I've been keeping a log of XP rewards for a while, trying to identify the most efficient ways to level alts without sacrificing any enjoyment. Here are the numbers I had before compared to the numbers I got today...
Pre-patch:
Argala - Normal - Solo - lvl 60 - Kazon ships - 4331 Specialization Points per run
Post-patch:
Argala - Normal - Solo - lvl 60 - Kazon Ships - 7695 Specialization Points per run
The end rewards was indeed increased from ~900 to ~2900, as Geko stated. However, specialization points received for critter kills were not increased to the same scale. If everything stated in the OP was correct, one should receive ~12,993 per run. Whether it was intentional or not, XP gain was nerfed overall.
This may end up being moot, because I have no idea if the emergency server maintenance that just kicked me out of the game is to fix the issue will critter kill and or DOff XP (I am in 100% agreement with the advice that Cryptic needs to seriously improve their communications), but I did some decent preliminary ship kill values.
Oddly, if anything I'm getting worse results that you are. I see virtually no evidence that the ship XP improved at all, whereas your results support it.
Cruisers were consistently worth around 215 Skill Points each (and this was across several factions), and Battleships were consistently 280 Skill Points (I must be having a serious memory lapse concerning what they were before; nevertheless, that is consistent with absolutely no change).
What is puzzling to me is that your data show a skill point increase of 3364. But if ship values are the same (as my data seem to indicate), the increase should have only been around 1888 (the boost to the mission reward alone).
Basically, pre-patch your kill XP from the stated run is 3387. Post patch it was 4863, or about 43% higher. That's well below the 190% boost it needs to be, but it is an increase.
I must be missing something... I don't do Argala much - are the number of waves very random? It's possible the apparent difference is caused by cruiser/frigate differences. Three frigates together is only about 60% what a 1 cruiser spawn is worth, so a frigate heavy run versus a cruiser heavy run *could* account for this, but I don't know if that's a possibility for that mission.
My DOff numbers were inconclusive; they seemed higher than normal (and a gained about a bar from them - which is close to what I was getting pre-patch), but I chose poorly in terms of the character I was using - he had a lot of Delta missions completed and this run had a lot of long duration missions complete. I really needed to see what one of my much more standardized DOffers was producing.
Still, I'm hoping the emergency maintenance fixes this and renders this bug moot. I am very eager to get out of here, virtually speaking. I'd read this forum is a toxic wasteland, but I thought the reports were exaggerated. They weren't. I've participated in many forums, and this is the most vile, reprehensible one I've ever experienced. And that's counting the one where the moderator was a complete sociopath... Geez.
i agree with most of what is being said about the progression nerf its really its seems odd that a company that is focused on squeezing every last penny out of people with make it suck a boring grind to lvl up your toons .
i was only thinking the other day beacuse of the grind to lvl up your toon now that ill focus on just 1 toon (which incenintly save me alot as i wont be aiming at getting any new ships released for my alts as the grind to lvl them up to get the best out of the new ships will be to tedious that it would take any enjoyment out of playing the game0
for example i just did about 6 of the carrdasian story line to get the set and got abot 5% progression per eposide and i was doing them for the first time on my alt (lvl 52) after spending all that time doing a major story line quest sequence and only progressed to the next lvl by 30% there has to be something wrong here .
anyway if the fun goes out of a game and it bocome a grind then theres plenty of other games to keep me happy eve is always fun to play
can we just have a stupidly high amount of XP from the missions in the gap between levels 50 - 60... then return it to it's current 2k reward for repeats.
Sure, there are some people who are very abrasive with their complaints--but you're ignoring a lot of posters who have well-reasoned complaints and are capable of posting them without resorting to personal attacks.
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.
Yesterday I was doing roughly 800 specialization points at the end plus the rest I got. The number given is definitely not x2.9.
Got it. The total gained was 2275. That's about a factor 2.8 increase over 800.
But that's consistent with a mission where most of the reward is the mission end reward. I can buy that given that every time I've done the Crystalline Entity mission the team pops a few Tholian ships and then focuses on the Entity itself - in other words there is barely any contribution from ship or critter kills. Without knowing the actual critter kill values, I can't determine if they remained static, went down, or went up.
That said, a team environment (like any STF) makes determining anything about critter kill xp very difficult. As I said before, all I can really determine is that it is consistent with the mission reward at the end being increased by a multiplier between around 2.5 and 2.9.
What is puzzling to me is that your data show a skill point increase of 3364. But if ship values are the same (as my data seem to indicate), the increase should have only been around 1888 (the boost to the mission reward alone).
Basically, pre-patch your kill XP from the stated run is 3387. Post patch it was 4863, or about 43% higher. That's well below the 190% boost it needs to be, but it is an increase.
The critters definitely got a XP boost, but only a relatively small one. Unfortunately, I never documented the XP per ship before the patch. I don't know how much exactly they gained. I do know there's no randomness to the spawns. I got the same result every time I'd run the mission vs Kazon. Also, today's patch was supposed to be an account server patch, in which case, I don't think they'll be making any changes to the game itself. Hopefully, they surprise me.
Sure, there are some people who are very abrasive with their complaints--but you're ignoring a lot of posters who have well-reasoned complaints and are capable of posting them without resorting to personal attacks.
Ignoring is not quite the right word. I have noticed them, and get meaningful things out of their posts. Your review of DR was one of them. Very insightful; I certainly agreed with more of your points than I disagreed with. And I agree that the reasoned complaints should be taken very seriously (and they don't appear to be).
But the ratio of bile and vitrol to reason is literally the highest I have ever seen. It makes finding the signal in the noise more difficult than any other forum I've participated it.
Old D'Angelo had a game
E-I-E-I-O
And in his game he had a nerf
E-I-E-I-O
With a nerf-nerf here
And a nerf-nerf there
Here nerf, there nerf
Everywhere nerf nerf!
Old D'Angelo had a game
E-I-E-I-O
And in his game he had a nerf
E-I-E-I-O
With a nerf-nerf here
And a nerf-nerf there
Here nerf, there nerf
Everywhere nerf nerf!
Any answer to whether skill points for defeating NPCs, which makes up the majority of skill point gains for many players, will be scaled to match these changes?
Even though quest rewards have been scaled up, this change amounted to a pretty huge loss in advancement speed for most players.
XP needed to level has almost been trippled. The XP given by NPCs has gone up by a little over 1/3 from around 300 to 420 or so (Given large race ship on advance). The amount from missions has gone up by about a little over three times. So the mission XP is correct from your thought process but what happen to your NPC math? Shouldn't their XP be given same example be closer to 900 XP?
You are still dropping the XP when we group too. I don't group a lot with my friends but would like to have the option as it stands it is faster and easier to play solo. At the least normalize the XP while grouped.
First off full points for writing the most obscurely worded patch note apology I have ever read. I had to re-read this 3 times to even begin to follow what was said.
While developing the Delta Rising expansion for Star Trek Online, there was a lot of work that went into creating the reward schema for skill points and the requirements of skill points needed to advance up through level 60. Throughout the creation and testing of these additional levels, much of the teams attention was focused on whether or not the rewards and the progression felt correct. Unfortunately, since the release of Delta Rising, we have discovered some issues with our initial math that have caused some anomalous player facing numbers that we are now addressing in our upcoming update.
"Anomalous Player facing numbers" that in awesome piece of vagueness, I have written solidly obscure stuff in my time but that deserves special recognition. I read this as "We thought about a whole lot and we did a lot of math, but when we put it all together the thing the players saw did not reflect our math, or in short we screwed up coding and didn't catch it. " Ok that happens, no big. What are you doing to make it right?
The major issue we discovered is that we built our rewards off of how much of a level we wanted a player to earn by completing a given piece of content, but did not take into account what the actual number that showed up in the rewards would be. The end result is that if you completed a mission or duty officer assignment at level 49 and then completed the same mission or duty officer assignment at level 51, you would see a smaller reward of skill points for the mission completed at a higher level. While this may sound like players were getting fewer rewards than they should, that has not been the case as the required amount of skill points needed to achieve each level was set with these values in mind.
I have read this paragraph a bunch, and it comes down to the last sentence "That was not the case as the required amount of skill points needed to achieve each level was set with these values in mind." These Values referring to what? The skill point reward, is my guess. If that's the case and the progression wasn't what was intended then how is it not the case?
As I read this it comes across as we didn't really TRIBBLE up, we just missed a little. Is that a fair assessment?
The fix for this is that we will be updating the skill point rewards throughout the game so that they will at least maintain the values seen at earlier levels, or in the case of critter kills increase in skill point rewards as you increase in player level. In order to maintain the desired rate of progression we spent a lot of time fine tuning while developing Delta Rising the required amount of skill points for each player level will also go up.
Yay we are finally getting to how you guys are going to get fix it! So your going to go back to leveling how we used to. Great. Everyone is thrilled I'm sure. Thank you for fixing this huge flaw.
While there are a lot of numbers changing, we have taken extra care to make sure that the speed at which players level up will remain the same as it is now. This means that if a player chooses to level up from level 51 to 52 using exclusively missions and it currently requires that they play 3 missions to do so, then after the update it will still take 3 missions to level up from 51 to 52 if you use them as your sole source of skill points. This is true for whatever method a player might choose for leveling up whether it is missions, duty officer assignments or critter kills.
So you intend 3 missions to equal a level of progression, great. That seems fine. I'm not sure that working right now but, we can get that in another thread.
We will furthermore ensure that every players current progression is maintained while these numbers are updated. If you are halfway between levels 52 and 53 now, you will remain halfway between levels 52 and 53 after the update even though the total amount of skill points to achieve level 52 has gone up and the required skill points youll need to earn in order to become level 53 has also gone up.
Ok enter my problem. So your acknowledge that this wasn't working as intended. When I logged in a I got the" you leveled sound", and figured you guys had finally fixed this, but when I checked the logs, low and behold there was no reward. In short you don't actually think that what happened was wrong, and that the players should not be compensated for the miserably leveling experience of this expansion. That is where I just find this to be ridiculous. The least you could do to make it up to the players would be to give us the benefit of this fix, and lets us pick up the spec point or level, instead of normalizing the whole update.
We are sorry to be making such drastic changes so far after launch. Unlike the other changes we are making to tune balance, this should be a one-time change.
Charles Gray
Lead Content Designer
Star Trek Online
Well thanks for the apology. But for the love of your IP, please get more testing, this leveling experience was terrible; and I for one find it silly that nothing has been done to alleviate the experience.
The math is completely irrelevant.
Fact is that the XP and leveling system was designed very very carefully to allow you to reach the minimum level for each new story mission as you complete the one before it, when playing on mid (advanced) difficulty.
If you choose the easy (normal) difficulty you need to do some things in between, but advanced allowed for a challenging, interesting and continuous story, which was absolutely lovely.
The player was essentially guided through the story seamlessly.
For some reason this fell under the table with the lvl50 missions not auto triggering, but it still worked.
It was only completely butchered with the XP update.
DR already feels grindy as hell because of the difficult enemies one has to kill, and because we get a way too big batch of "patrol these systems" dropped on us with every assignment.
It is NOT a good strategy to then impose another barrier to prevent people from continuing even with those until they get hundred thousands worth of XP from somewhere.
It would make people feel like they have to abort grinding towards the awesome missions to grind some other missions.
= "I'm sorry, you need to grind a bit more before we can allow you to grind even more to be allowed to see the actual gist of the expansion"
Sometimes i'm seriously considering applying for some job at cryptic just to be able to remind people there of things that should be common sense, because most of the recent ****-ups besides the truly awesome new content are seriously inexplicable rookie mistakes.
every mmo that i ever played that turned into a grind feast all have 1 thing in common a serious lack of players
add content that players enjoy playing not some repietive bull-**** that every1 get tired of
i lvl up from 50-to 60 before the patch and tought that was boring apart from doing the missions
i did a mission and had 2/3 to go in lvl before i could get the next 1 so i did the boring grind to get the so no missions after lvl 60 so all thats left is the boring grind to lvl up my specilisation and now youve made that boring grind even longer what a game this is.
p.s. that post about the changes by that dev that guy needs to get a reaily check hes living in cloud cookoo land.
I had a 1% hope the downage was to fix the obvious bugs in the exp. But I report no change to doff skill point rewards. Doffing remains nerfed into the stone age.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Before the Thursday patch I was able to run a patrol mission in Tau Dewa (yeah that sector block of space) I don't remember the planet name its just 5 waves of kdf ships you need to blow up.
But I was clearing almost 1 full white bar of xp, now im receiving only 1/3 of that, mind you im not solely running this over and over, I usually do it like 2-3 times a day at most.
Doffing has also slowed the xp crawl even further.
Dan Stahl, we need you. You are our only hope. (it truly says something about the current state of the game when im certain many others are starting to feel this same way)
If anything, a skill cpt point should of been granted at 25k XP instead of 55k...not around 160k instead of 55k.
Again, elite grounds grant under 1k, so go ahead and do 200 runs for a cpt skill point, since space is out of the equation.
Before the Thursday patch I was able to run a patrol mission in Tau Dewa (yeah that sector block of space) I don't remember the planet name its just 5 waves of kdf ships you need to blow up.
But I was clearing almost 1 full white bar of xp, now im receiving only 1/3 of that, mind you im not solely running this over and over, I usually do it like 2-3 times a day at most.
Doffing has also slowed the xp crawl even further.
Dan Stahl, we need you. You are our only hope. (it truly says something about the current state of the game when im certain many others are starting to feel this same way)
Comments
This may end up being moot, because I have no idea if the emergency server maintenance that just kicked me out of the game is to fix the issue will critter kill and or DOff XP (I am in 100% agreement with the advice that Cryptic needs to seriously improve their communications), but I did some decent preliminary ship kill values.
Oddly, if anything I'm getting worse results that you are. I see virtually no evidence that the ship XP improved at all, whereas your results support it.
Cruisers were consistently worth around 215 Skill Points each (and this was across several factions), and Battleships were consistently 280 Skill Points (I must be having a serious memory lapse concerning what they were before; nevertheless, that is consistent with absolutely no change).
What is puzzling to me is that your data show a skill point increase of 3364. But if ship values are the same (as my data seem to indicate), the increase should have only been around 1888 (the boost to the mission reward alone).
Basically, pre-patch your kill XP from the stated run is 3387. Post patch it was 4863, or about 43% higher. That's well below the 190% boost it needs to be, but it is an increase.
I must be missing something... I don't do Argala much - are the number of waves very random? It's possible the apparent difference is caused by cruiser/frigate differences. Three frigates together is only about 60% what a 1 cruiser spawn is worth, so a frigate heavy run versus a cruiser heavy run *could* account for this, but I don't know if that's a possibility for that mission.
My DOff numbers were inconclusive; they seemed higher than normal (and a gained about a bar from them - which is close to what I was getting pre-patch), but I chose poorly in terms of the character I was using - he had a lot of Delta missions completed and this run had a lot of long duration missions complete. I really needed to see what one of my much more standardized DOffers was producing.
Still, I'm hoping the emergency maintenance fixes this and renders this bug moot. I am very eager to get out of here, virtually speaking. I'd read this forum is a toxic wasteland, but I thought the reports were exaggerated. They weren't. I've participated in many forums, and this is the most vile, reprehensible one I've ever experienced. And that's counting the one where the moderator was a complete sociopath... Geez.
i was only thinking the other day beacuse of the grind to lvl up your toon now that ill focus on just 1 toon (which incenintly save me alot as i wont be aiming at getting any new ships released for my alts as the grind to lvl them up to get the best out of the new ships will be to tedious that it would take any enjoyment out of playing the game0
for example i just did about 6 of the carrdasian story line to get the set and got abot 5% progression per eposide and i was doing them for the first time on my alt (lvl 52) after spending all that time doing a major story line quest sequence and only progressed to the next lvl by 30% there has to be something wrong here .
anyway if the fun goes out of a game and it bocome a grind then theres plenty of other games to keep me happy eve is always fun to play
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.
Got it. The total gained was 2275. That's about a factor 2.8 increase over 800.
But that's consistent with a mission where most of the reward is the mission end reward. I can buy that given that every time I've done the Crystalline Entity mission the team pops a few Tholian ships and then focuses on the Entity itself - in other words there is barely any contribution from ship or critter kills. Without knowing the actual critter kill values, I can't determine if they remained static, went down, or went up.
That said, a team environment (like any STF) makes determining anything about critter kill xp very difficult. As I said before, all I can really determine is that it is consistent with the mission reward at the end being increased by a multiplier between around 2.5 and 2.9.
The critters definitely got a XP boost, but only a relatively small one. Unfortunately, I never documented the XP per ship before the patch. I don't know how much exactly they gained. I do know there's no randomness to the spawns. I got the same result every time I'd run the mission vs Kazon. Also, today's patch was supposed to be an account server patch, in which case, I don't think they'll be making any changes to the game itself. Hopefully, they surprise me.
Ignoring is not quite the right word. I have noticed them, and get meaningful things out of their posts. Your review of DR was one of them. Very insightful; I certainly agreed with more of your points than I disagreed with. And I agree that the reasoned complaints should be taken very seriously (and they don't appear to be).
But the ratio of bile and vitrol to reason is literally the highest I have ever seen. It makes finding the signal in the noise more difficult than any other forum I've participated it.
E-I-E-I-O
And in his game he had a nerf
E-I-E-I-O
With a nerf-nerf here
And a nerf-nerf there
Here nerf, there nerf
Everywhere nerf nerf!
Old D'Angelo had a nerf
E-I-E-I-O
>Cryptic at work<
My Lvl 59 ROM character was about 40k EP away from 60 before the patch. After yesterday's patch he jumped to 116k away.
That certainly seems pretty whacked.
Cool story BRAH...
FYI - You came off condescending.
Pretty sure you have already been spoken to about the ***** storm you have created on the forums / in game.
Not long now mate till that last straw breaks the proverbial camel's back and they ask you to clear your things and hand in your door pass.
The Sooner, The Better...
YOUR A JOKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yet... no one is laughing =D
D,
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Please keep the QQ to a minimum.
>>>PUNISH THE FEDs<<<
>>>Positive Feedback from a PvE HERO<<<
Outstanding!! you just made me laugh out loud....unfortunately I'm still at work ...but it was worth it!
Even though quest rewards have been scaled up, this change amounted to a pretty huge loss in advancement speed for most players.
Agreed, do us all a favour Gecko and resign and go serve cookies in Subways.
You are still dropping the XP when we group too. I don't group a lot with my friends but would like to have the option as it stands it is faster and easier to play solo. At the least normalize the XP while grouped.
"Anomalous Player facing numbers" that in awesome piece of vagueness, I have written solidly obscure stuff in my time but that deserves special recognition. I read this as "We thought about a whole lot and we did a lot of math, but when we put it all together the thing the players saw did not reflect our math, or in short we screwed up coding and didn't catch it. " Ok that happens, no big. What are you doing to make it right?
I have read this paragraph a bunch, and it comes down to the last sentence "That was not the case as the required amount of skill points needed to achieve each level was set with these values in mind." These Values referring to what? The skill point reward, is my guess. If that's the case and the progression wasn't what was intended then how is it not the case?
As I read this it comes across as we didn't really TRIBBLE up, we just missed a little. Is that a fair assessment?
Yay we are finally getting to how you guys are going to get fix it! So your going to go back to leveling how we used to. Great. Everyone is thrilled I'm sure. Thank you for fixing this huge flaw.
So you intend 3 missions to equal a level of progression, great. That seems fine. I'm not sure that working right now but, we can get that in another thread.
Ok enter my problem. So your acknowledge that this wasn't working as intended. When I logged in a I got the" you leveled sound", and figured you guys had finally fixed this, but when I checked the logs, low and behold there was no reward. In short you don't actually think that what happened was wrong, and that the players should not be compensated for the miserably leveling experience of this expansion. That is where I just find this to be ridiculous. The least you could do to make it up to the players would be to give us the benefit of this fix, and lets us pick up the spec point or level, instead of normalizing the whole update.
Well thanks for the apology. But for the love of your IP, please get more testing, this leveling experience was terrible; and I for one find it silly that nothing has been done to alleviate the experience.
Bring the fun back to STO.
And the Devs have yet to do ANYTHING constructive to address the players concerns.
In-fact, the recent update has just made things a hell of a lot worse by all accounts.
But its cool, apparently there is a party this evening in Club47 to celebrate the fantastic launch of Delta Grinding.
Total Joke!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
D,
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Please keep the QQ to a minimum.
>>>PUNISH THE FEDs<<<
>>>Positive Feedback from a PvE HERO<<<
The math is completely irrelevant.
Fact is that the XP and leveling system was designed very very carefully to allow you to reach the minimum level for each new story mission as you complete the one before it, when playing on mid (advanced) difficulty.
If you choose the easy (normal) difficulty you need to do some things in between, but advanced allowed for a challenging, interesting and continuous story, which was absolutely lovely.
The player was essentially guided through the story seamlessly.
For some reason this fell under the table with the lvl50 missions not auto triggering, but it still worked.
It was only completely butchered with the XP update.
DR already feels grindy as hell because of the difficult enemies one has to kill, and because we get a way too big batch of "patrol these systems" dropped on us with every assignment.
It is NOT a good strategy to then impose another barrier to prevent people from continuing even with those until they get hundred thousands worth of XP from somewhere.
It would make people feel like they have to abort grinding towards the awesome missions to grind some other missions.
= "I'm sorry, you need to grind a bit more before we can allow you to grind even more to be allowed to see the actual gist of the expansion"
Sometimes i'm seriously considering applying for some job at cryptic just to be able to remind people there of things that should be common sense, because most of the recent ****-ups besides the truly awesome new content are seriously inexplicable rookie mistakes.
add content that players enjoy playing not some repietive bull-**** that every1 get tired of
i lvl up from 50-to 60 before the patch and tought that was boring apart from doing the missions
i did a mission and had 2/3 to go in lvl before i could get the next 1 so i did the boring grind to get the so no missions after lvl 60 so all thats left is the boring grind to lvl up my specilisation and now youve made that boring grind even longer what a game this is.
p.s. that post about the changes by that dev that guy needs to get a reaily check hes living in cloud cookoo land.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
But I was clearing almost 1 full white bar of xp, now im receiving only 1/3 of that, mind you im not solely running this over and over, I usually do it like 2-3 times a day at most.
Doffing has also slowed the xp crawl even further.
Dan Stahl, we need you. You are our only hope. (it truly says something about the current state of the game when im certain many others are starting to feel this same way)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE
altering the deal ^_^
Again, elite grounds grant under 1k, so go ahead and do 200 runs for a cpt skill point, since space is out of the equation.
@Tonyjohnminter
Mosquito Squadron & SVKE
Dan Stahl, Brandon Flakes; it was the right age
Cryptic needs to fix this TRIBBLE today. Take the server down, do an 'emergency patch,' whatever.. just fix it.
The way it is now is just ridiculous. Why must every update be a TRIBBLE job lately? :mad: