My long winded take on DR

nicha0

I've let some time pass to see how the rage, hate, depression, and whatever else passes about DR and STO lately. Personally I really stopped playing STO about a year ago; now I would log in, Doff, Doff on my alts, and chat, but actually play anything? No, maybe one match a month or less.

The forums have been raging lately though, and show no signs of slowing down. However, I am curious, because it seems most people don't know how to properly voice their problems, or maybe my view is just different than the rest? I'd like to know if others feel the same.

You see, as a person who was just logging on and holding out hope this level cap change was a time to fix what was so terribly broken in the game, DR was a stab in the heart. The level cap change makes us buy new ships? Expected. Upgrade gear? Costs aren't terrible (though epic quality upgrades is stupidly overpriced.) New content was put in, but its no different than any new content we've had before. The bulk of DR seems OK, but at the same time its horribly wrong, there is more than statistics and metrics that make a game fun, and that is what is missing.

Here is how I feel, and why Cryptic has failed me. I don't care about buying a new ship, because the game is simply not fun, why would I pay to not play a game? I don't care about upgrading gear because I don't need to, also I'd need to play not fun missions to get the material to upgrade equipment that I don't care about. I don't really care about specialization points because the game itself isn't fun anymore, so why would I play or grind on really boring missions to gain more? The problem is, things aren't fun here anymore, not for a while.

From what I can see, the game fails and will continue to fail because it ceases to not be fun. And from knowing, understanding and breaking the game mechanics over the years I know why its not fun. The original game had very real limits in the mechanics to stop escorts from being tanks, cruisers from being DPS machines, and gave science a purpose. These designs were in the powers and ship set ups. As new abilities were released (cough **sold) they broke the limits, allowed tac cmd cruisers to exist, removed weapon power drain completely, made an escort's weakness disappear it has created larger and larger problems. Abilities like A2B w/ Doffs, once rarely used because simply couldn't survive enough without help are now the standard. Combine A2B with APB and BFaW and what a mess, these powers that were impossible to combine before are now a free for all, because they needed to sell more power, instead of make a sustainable intelligent business model.

So the question is, even if the content we had was amazing, how could you ever balance it when one player can do 100x the damage of another? How do you make the content a challenge when the outgoing damage from enemies is laughable, but can't be increased because it starts to one shot people again?

This is why DR failed for me, a new level cap, new skill levels, this was the opportunity for a real designer to brush off the past mistakes, fix the issues and get things going again. Instead they just ran some multipler to enemy HP. At that point I knew it was over, the devs had no interest in making anything fun, and if you didn't subscribe to the cookie cutter ship design you were simply not worthy of playing at higher "difficulties" (ie: mindless damage sinks)

If this one part had shown a sign of hope, a glimmer the devs gave a TRIBBLE about fun, I'd probably still be playing. If the missions weren't mindless shooting, I'd be in the queues getting my purple R+D drops, upgrading, getting spec points, etc, but reality is... the game is like playing that mind sucking dilithium mining mini-disaster over and over. If the missions we played weren't started with walls of text (that has no point in a timed mission) followed by just endless DPSing. The sad truth is there is nothing Star Trek about the missions that are in the game, while the STFs are still the best we have, they are really old, really static and require the exact same actions everytime. We have nothing dynamic, nothing that makes you think, nothing that reacts, uses attack combinations that are the least bit threatening. Enemies don't try to heal, defend, retreat, protect objectives.

Of course nothing interesting can be made, designed or remastered until the DPS problems are fixed. If that ever happened, the queue missions do desperately need to be remastered. A system needs to be placed to graduate advancement to Advanced or Elite, walls of text that are never read removed, and the objectives clearly indicated while playing. Higher difficulties need better AI, and sustained damage. Teamwork needs to be added, no more blindly shooting anything that moves (thats ok for some missions not everything in the game)

So to sum up the massive wall of non-sense, the game isn't fun. The costs of DR, to me, are acceptable, the people whining about them are not justified, IMO. The upgrade costs to epic status are the exception to that. Launching an expansion and level cap increase with only a small fraction of the content needed to get there is mind blowing. I'm at level 64/65 in rift, and I haven't grinded anything, I've skipped more content than I can count. Devs making xp adjustments at this stage in the game is like design 101, how did they skip that?

Our fleet has been shrinking fast, at some point recruiting new players it gets depressing because all you hear are questions of why is this that, and that this? The answer is time and time again, bugs. Our fleet is now empty, most have moved to Rift.. a really bug free game, refreshing.

So am I off base here? Do others find the missions in the game super fun? And if so, what level are you on in terms of combat efficiency?

kayajay

I feel like I've invested too much time (and money) in the game to just give up on it entirely. I just want to be able to log back in for a few hours, have some fun and do the same thing the next day...like I've done for the last three years! Right now, all that I'm doing is grinding...dilithium, a few things on the exchange and assignments.

nicha0

valoreah wrote: »

Then.... stop playing completely and move on to something you enjoy? Seems very straightforward to me.

It has already been done, but it wasn't the point of the post.