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Please, Fix. Advanced. Queues.
bareel
Member Posts: 3 Arc User
The most compelling aspect of STO vs other MMOs is the casual pick up group nature of the group content. Not needing to form a group on my own of qualified players to participate in the content and get the rewards is a refreshing change from the MMOs of my past.
The design philosophy that has allowed me to do this is the idea that one good player can ensure victory for the team. This was true in the past for nearly all elite queues. Some of the new advanced queues, intended to be the new equivalent to old elite, are still like this. Others are nothing short of pure frustration to play in a PuG.
Your new design philosophy's are inherently flawed for advanced difficulty. First off the offhand comment that the development team expected players to communicate is nothing short of ignorant and naivety. Your content isn't even structured for that to happen! In most games before a difficult 'boss fight' the team decides when to initiate the encounter allowing for the players to communicate and form a plan STO does not even have this basic design component. And for that matter how on earth am I supposed to communicate with those who don't speak english who are on the same server as I? Or does the development team actually expect everyone in the game to share a single common language when the country they live in doesn't even make that foolish assumption? Finally why on earth are metrics being used as the most important tool for determining difficulty? Why is it even a design goal to have a specific % of attempts end in failure and frustration? Does that metric even bother to take into account premade VS PuG? This new approach would be instantly seen as silly by anyone who has a history of playing in PuGs something I guess the development team is lacking.
Don't get me wrong, some of the queues are where they should be. Crystalline Catastrophe for example is pretty spot on if you ask me. Others though are flat out stupid to expect a PuG to be able to complete reliably. And yet this new patch is only adjusting one and making it easier argh.
Elite queues should not be easier to PuG than any of the advanced. This is not the case. Yes this is a rant but it does have a few nuggets of constructive criticism if you excuse the tone. Sadly I fear the only devs who had that capability have moved to greener pastures.
ENJOYABLE ADVANCED
Bug Hunt
Crystalline Catastrophe
Infected the Conduit
Undine Infiltration
NOT ENJOYABLE ADVANCED
Azure Nebula Rescue
Borg Disconnected
Defend Rh'lhho Station
The rest I haven't tried because the queues are empty for them. I take that as a sign they are not enjoyable.
The design philosophy that has allowed me to do this is the idea that one good player can ensure victory for the team. This was true in the past for nearly all elite queues. Some of the new advanced queues, intended to be the new equivalent to old elite, are still like this. Others are nothing short of pure frustration to play in a PuG.
Your new design philosophy's are inherently flawed for advanced difficulty. First off the offhand comment that the development team expected players to communicate is nothing short of ignorant and naivety. Your content isn't even structured for that to happen! In most games before a difficult 'boss fight' the team decides when to initiate the encounter allowing for the players to communicate and form a plan STO does not even have this basic design component. And for that matter how on earth am I supposed to communicate with those who don't speak english who are on the same server as I? Or does the development team actually expect everyone in the game to share a single common language when the country they live in doesn't even make that foolish assumption? Finally why on earth are metrics being used as the most important tool for determining difficulty? Why is it even a design goal to have a specific % of attempts end in failure and frustration? Does that metric even bother to take into account premade VS PuG? This new approach would be instantly seen as silly by anyone who has a history of playing in PuGs something I guess the development team is lacking.
Don't get me wrong, some of the queues are where they should be. Crystalline Catastrophe for example is pretty spot on if you ask me. Others though are flat out stupid to expect a PuG to be able to complete reliably. And yet this new patch is only adjusting one and making it easier argh.
Elite queues should not be easier to PuG than any of the advanced. This is not the case. Yes this is a rant but it does have a few nuggets of constructive criticism if you excuse the tone. Sadly I fear the only devs who had that capability have moved to greener pastures.
ENJOYABLE ADVANCED
Bug Hunt
Crystalline Catastrophe
Infected the Conduit
Undine Infiltration
NOT ENJOYABLE ADVANCED
Azure Nebula Rescue
Borg Disconnected
Defend Rh'lhho Station
The rest I haven't tried because the queues are empty for them. I take that as a sign they are not enjoyable.
Post edited by bareel on
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Comments
Please explain why an elite queue should be easier to complete than an advanced? Why are you not upset that several elite queues are stupid easy if you want a challenge so badly?
Finally it is not 'I' who is struggling with the challenge. I can rescue every borg spawn in disconnected taking the middle solo. That doesn't do me any good when the rest of the team fails to rescue borg spawns with two players.
And no, premade is not the solution. It defeats the primary reason I have chosen STO over other MMOs.
He can't. The queues are empty.
Well, that and I do not beleive the advanced queues should have the same insta-fail on the objectives as Elite... some, sure, but not all.
Why should a l33t one care about anything in the lowly advanced queues?
Or can't you hack elite so you've got to get what little cred you can in Advanced?
Advanced was supposed to be old Elite. That is not the case.
Well if its as one hundred others, maybe something is wrong?
Be civil about stuff,
One has to remember before DR came out people could sleep walk half of the reputation missions to get the needed items to get the Reputation Gear, it isn't that way now and for a lot of the newer captains they don't have the gear to be even half decent to get said gear to be half decent, its worse than applying for a credit card to build credit when you don't have credit to begin with.
don't be a dimwit
if the changes were good people would be playing and eating up the content and saying "boy isn't this great!" but that didn't happen did it?
a couple of the ques are better balanced and more exciting, the rest are ... unfinished at best
Guessing you didn't actually read his post, eh? Too many words? Too many big words? Need to tale a remedial reading course? Rise to the challenge!
I totally agree, but crystalline advanced has been nerfed to too easy now... even the blast doesn't kill my paper thin BoP and the patch notes are nerfing it even more.
I havn't done advanced Rh'lhho but advanced azure isn't too bad. The tholians have crazy strong shields but their hulls aren't so big. It could be the build I was using though.
anyway, other than that I totally agree. Some of those elite queues are stupid easy while some advanced ones can be extremely hard to PuG.
Yeah, I was having a blast in Advanced Crystalline before they nerfed it out the wahzoo...and...to see they're nerfing it even more - well, that's just Advanced /Facepalm.
I mean, are they looking to turn it into a Shuttle queue?
You still haven't read the OP's post yet, have you? That's just...Elite /Facepalm.
Advanced STFs are not too hard with a competent team who knows exactly what to do. Difficult, yes. Frustrating, definately.
Pug it, however, and gurantee a fail.
I'm guessing the OP's OP isn't the only thing you haven't read.
My bad...my bad...it's not about you reading it or not...it's your inability to comprehend any of it.
I do agree they have lost their tiny minds when doing the q's but I would like to suggest they are adjusting some and not others because they haven't been able to collect data on them in a large enough sample yet to decide if its right or not... that being said.. if they are adjusting one of the easier advanced to be easier it would stand logically to follow that they should nerf the rest .. the reasons they are not? possibly because not enough people are playing them I use the crystaline one for fleet marks and I think most other people do as well so its very busy as a result of that I think.
Their q system design is geared to quick matches which screams casual yet they are trying to design it like a raid.. but have forgotten they are only quick things for people short on time that was the entire point of the q system even they stated it in the blog when they said they wanted to add a third level, but it seems they have forgotten what they had intended to do in the first place.
I still maintain if they want to make this type of elite content the solution is elsewhere and not in the q system because truly hard content takes time and thought and real communication you can't communicate in a pug and its only a 10-15 minute 'quicky' to boot. If they want to design truly hard content they need to learn how to create real raid content.. build true puzzles into the content and set it up so that people can sit and sort it out and take breaks.
What they have done with the q system is pure and utter garbage, but this was a massive mistake for them to undo it would be well it aint gonna happen. The best we can hope for is for them to roll back advanced to the old elite and put all the wierd 'new idea' into a new elite classification but I no longer care. I have all my gear on my guys and they only thing i am worried about is the power cells from delta rising on one or two characters. I have put the q system on ignore basically and just do a few for fleet marks and the event ones on normal and have fun in the open zones. I think a lot of people are doing this lets hope they add more open zones because the q's are not very fun at all anymore.
Give everyone here 600-800 lockbox keys and you will see them "rising to the challenge" .
... otherwise enjoy your little armchair quarterback slogans and watch as nothing changes ... , as DPS through money does not = skill ...
you make the assumption that people are complaining because they can't do the content if you read his post he can do the content he just finds it to be not very fun at all along with many others around.
many of the q's are simply put a miserable experience i dont even like the bug hunt even though i have done it many many times the concept of "the zerg" in a 15 minute do it quick in the middle of it is not particularly fun for most people. Bug hunt is definately about "the zerg" along with most others its not fun lol
and on top of it now we have the ability for a player to enter any of these q's and automatically fail it just for laughs and kicks and giggles. That is a huge huge design flaw a large gapping whole of a mistake if a single player can sabotage a match in under a minute REPEATEDLY if he gets back in line to do it to another group.
The original Borg STF's were designed as 1+ hour raids .
Then they & their story got butchered and split in favor of the casual crowd who has 10-15 minutes to log in for something quick -- and now they refined the difficulty toward a raid style game again but they went overboard on the smaller critters .
... it wasn't like this neither in the old long STF's , nor in The Hive, which was supposed to be harder then the rest of the coffee break casual STF's ...
then if this is what he wants why is he saying "why are you nerfting crystaline entity"
No its not about tactics he can do the q's its about incredibly poor game design. REALLY bad game design.
I can't say what I think about the game design here and I dont know why they are doing it because it really is very bad game design and even though I have seen them do very complex things I question the credentials of the person who is making the decisions about this q system at every turn. Who is doing the real work? and math and are these people still working here? are we dealing with people with very little training who have to hire game designers on contract from time to time to help them? because this is not good game design most students do better work then this !
A decent game should be able to motivate the player to find better ways of playing it through its rules and structure. If it becomes automatic (which is what most of the old elite events were) then the devs as those responsible for the health of that game should try to find ways to encourage the players to take a more serious view of gameplay mechanics and strategy.
That ISN'T to say "hardcore or go home" but just to point out that expecting the game to abide absolutely any approach is basically equivalent to saying that the game, as a game (with rules, structure, mechanics, strategy, ect.), shouldn't exist. Even the casual stuff (ex. Settler's of Catan, solitare, or Pok
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You didn't specify any specific disagreements...you just disagreed as a whole. Which suggests you did not read it. There's all sorts of things one could easily disagree with and argue against what bareel said and feels. But by disagreeing with it as a whole, you're saying you believe Elite should be easier than Advanced? C'mon, now...that's just silly.
All Advanced should be more difficult than All Normal.
All Elite should be more difficult than All Advanced.
Wouldn't you agree with that? Cause that was one of the points brought up by bareel.
What about queues that will require communication...at what level of difficulty should that communication be required? Now there's obviously the stuff that doesn't require any communication and folks just to have half a clue with some situational awareness, right? If there is something that actually requires communication though...this being an international game with little guarantee that everybody on the same team speaks the same language...shouldn't that affect the potential difficulty of the queue? Cause that was one of the points brought up by bareel.
You brought up the point where he had mentioned being able to handle middle on his own and how that should stand as an example of how BDA is not too hard. Should BDA be a 3-man queue or perhaps should there be 5 nodes?
I've been called an Elitist for thinking folks shouldn't be able to PUG Elite...for me, on an intellectual level, it just doesn't sit right for a haphazard group to hop on in to take something out that's supposedly at the Elite level. It doesn't really make it sound Elite, eh? Advanced on the other hand..yeah, a random group with half a clue should be able to hit that up, no? Shouldn't be zero fail, imho - cause they should still have half a clue and be paying some kind of attention...but it's something folks should be able to hit up with random groups and have a decent chance at it. Where obviously we'd be left with Normal for folks that just installed the game the day before sort of thing...
Some Advanced needs to be tweaked up, some needs to be tweaked down...it's for a certain group of players - right? So all in all, it should be meeting the needs and challenging those players - right? Do you feel that Advanced is successfully doing that across the board? Cause you know, by the simple disagreement you offered to the OP - that's kind of how you come off...and well, that's just silly. Calling it a crybaby post was just lazy...
And stuff like this suggests you didn't read this OP's OP, but that you read this OP's OP: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1302591 Cause yeah, your initial reply would have been perfect for that thread.
I was here when they had the original set up I have actually done the initial ones they were much better and set up for this raid concept so you could you know pause and gather your thoughts. LoL I am a beta tester and still have gear from the very very first Borg content added to the game in 2010-2011.
What they are trying to do is shoehorn 'raid content' into something that was designed for another purpose. The people who designed these q's designed it with another purpose in mind. So i question the credentials of the person doing this to the q system because its breaking it. It was not designed with this in mind and its showing.. Its utter total garbage
If they want to do this they should revive the old versions for the "elite" crowd and run them along with these 15 minute stf's.
I am shaking my head because I believe the issue here is that the work done on the STF's was done by developers they hired for this purpose with a design document which had a totally different purpose then what they are doing now.
The entire q system screams "casual" , "quicky" yet they are shoehorning this stupid raid concept into it and it does not work. Its dumb.. lol
Both difficulty & requirements have changed .
The player base has not .
Spreading out awards (720 instead of 960 dil) across all queues has not worked as an incentive to lure the players back .
Most queues languish empty .
The privately run queues are fewer then before .
Something is clearly not working ... , and calling players to adapt is not working either .
But you are welcome to keep going at it if you think it'll help .
Just keep in mind that this is not new content for many of us . If it was, then your call to adept might make more sense .
... Cryptic tried to revitalize 2-5 year old content by moving a few sliders . They failed ... .
It's left to irony then that much of the content they sought to revitalize was actually played more before their incompetent meddling .
bad game design is bad game design there are principles that people should head and things they should do there is a right way and a wrong way and nerfing things wont fix this problem at all. It wont do anything.
they have schools where they teach things to people and there is a reason for this.. suffice it to say i question the credentials of the people making the q decisions. Also the concepts I am speaking of are not "opinion". If a player can tank something in under 30 seconds then this requires looking at. If these people worked for another company well lets say they probably would have trouble getting work if they say "I revamped the q system release for delta rising" in an interview lol. I will leave it at that because I am play this game for fun and for the most part I think cryptic does a good job in many areas. They do have some serious issues in a few areas one of them is their facial animation and another is this q system which they broke when they revamped it.
No .. I dont think they would do so well if they were asked in an interview what they did for this game and the answer was "i revamped the q system for delta rising release". It can't be balanced that is the point. I could list the problem with it but I have said enough already lol.
suffice it to say I understand what they are up to but its not jiving with what they said in the blog about casual friendly add to that the time limit for normal to elite is the same lolol among other things..
Its just a big huge mess and nerfing mobs repeatedly will not really fix the underlying issue of "zerg" in 15 minutes and press 3 buttons on 3 sides of the map to win. You know they could pare down the q system to 5 STF's and delete the rest and no one would notice because they are ALL the same. There are only like 4 or 5 truly unique experiences in the entire system. okay now i am starting to say what is wrong again..
(shuts up)
the ones I have tried that seemed about right to me are Borg Disconnected and The Cure Found, the ones that I found a bit too hard to win are INFECTED: THE CONDUIT and KHITOMER VORTEX but although they are too hard they are still winnable if you are lucky to get the right team.
all the games I played with random teams, I found the wait for a game was a tad long but not to the stage where I gave up waiting.
the thing is though if you win easy there is no challenge and the wins are kind of meh, when they are slightly harder but they get the difficulty just right like The Cure Found they are actually more enjoyable and you feel much more rewarded from the win.
im not including mirror as it doesn't matter so much if you win or loose, sure you might get a slightly smaller reward but you still get the main prize the Multidimensional Transporter.
that is the biggest problem you need say the borg neural processor to get the best gear to win but you cant get the borg neural processor if you don't win.
if they at least give these items regardless of win or loose like they do for the mirror event, or even if they gave them for the normal version it would be something.
sure its ok for us seasoned players who have the gear but newer players may not.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.