It's sad that the leetsters can not understand the problem here.
The health of the game is paramount. or CBS but I digress. Punchy.
You can not change a very casual and very generous game to being a leeeet only raid game in one day. Nevermind the fact that most difficult games are being made easier these days so they can stay in business.
STO used to pay out way more of the real game currency than any game I've seen. They are cutting back on this - okay - I can handle it.
STO used to allow leveling to max in 1 week. Now the level 110 is more like 6 months for me. I describe myself as hardcore casual. And I am fine with this.
STO used to have very casual fun and easy endgame group content. This was eliminated with the HP bags and failqueues. Whoa. Now all of a sudden I can't pug. That pisses me off. Now we have a problem.
Others have the same problem with situations 1 and 2. The result = empty queues.
Cryptic will wake up one morning in late January. They will see the player logins and notice that they are half what they were in late September. They will go into full panic mode - release some ridiculous lockboxes they have been saving. They will return the queue rewards and remove the fail conditions. They will have dilithium weekend. etc etc. But I think by then it may be too late. With the population cut in half or worse the game will likely go into maintenance mode after the anniversary. How long it will last after that depends on how long they can milk the few big spenders.
Is it bad that I fear you're 100% right?! Others may think you're crazy, but I know your mother had you tested.
Do your metrics *today*, Cryptic. Turn yourselves, whilst you still can!
Jellico....Engineer ground.....Da'val Romulan space Sci
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
I am not sure people insist that the entire playerbbase has to over night learn how to pump out large amounts of damage, create vast grab wells and know all the ins and outs of the queues so they don't cause one of the awesome new mandatory objectives to fail.
After all there's this vast store of knowledge immediately available in game that anyone can research and immediately understand all the mechanics of the game right?
If you expect a casual player to waste their one hour a day trying to find information on how to properly build their ship you are nuts. It took me months of pouring through the forum and analyzing builds till I got a clue. Real casual players that just want to play a Star Trek game to role play and have fun won't do that.
They also won't spend 20-30 minutes in a queue only to fail, or get smaller rewards. Hence dead queues.
Big the Question is why change so much when 75% all people don't like change.
Someone made a decision here without looking at the impact or if acceptable by players.
Just adding new EPIC queues and Level 60 queues would have worked better now looking back.
I guess wishful thinking like all the rest of you that a post here and there will actually get something done. Because my post is not a vent, but hope that someone in Cryptic will rad it and see the light.
Blake does have a point. It's kind of like putting a frog in boiling water it jumps right out, but if you slowly increase the temperature it just sits there. They should have added the elite queues only first. Then once their "metrics" indicated that the player base was ready increased the difficulty of advanced. Too bad, if players keep leaving as the evidence we have is suggesting the game ends. Hopefully I am wrong, but if cryptic doesn't fix the queues this game won't last the year.
When I posted a few weeks ago about the problems that Cryptic's new direction was causing within the game I was called a whiner. Even as recently as 24hrs ago some of the people now posting in this thread were calling me ridiculous.
Big the Question is why change so much when 75% all people don't like change.
For launch, they weren't catering to the average spender. They wanted to see how much they could leech from the whales.
The average spender isn't going to fork out much more than they usually do (maybe give themselves a wee bonus to celebrate the launch or celebrate holidays ). But the whales are impulse buyers/early adopters. Some of them may drop $1000 or more come launch. Just to get the best gear etc. Now that that has worn out (earlier than expected, eh cryptic?) we're seeing a rebalance down towards the average spender. It'll drop a bit more after Xmas, but we'll see more balance soon.
When I posted a few weeks ago about the problems that Cryptic's new direction was causing within the game I was called a whiner. Even as recently as 24hrs ago some of the people now posting in this thread were calling me ridiculous.
Welcome back to reality.
rofl i was speaking about the q's since day one because its a major game design error. The rest of the stuff they have done is passable, but they really messed up on the q system ...they broke it. Everything else is about balance and bugs. Delta content is also pretty decent despite the complaints its good work and makes sense. The q's make no sense at all.
i understand why queues are empty; curretly i try (yes i try) to get the maco shield for my new toon. today i tried infected the conduit advanced (failure), khitomer in stasis advanced (failure); + in ISA a guy with the xindi escort was hum! how i could say it; polite.
thus no BNP, and 20 marks for 2 stfs.
btw, yesterday same thing; no BNP and 20 marks
i'm not an sto wizard, when i fire on spheres, it's like firing on walls. 4 players to destroy 1 sphere.
they should change advanced, and add an elite ISA, for the elite players.
After 2 days, i'm really frustrated and disgusted.
I am not sure people insist that the entire playerbbase has to over night learn how to pump out large amounts of damage, create vast grab wells and know all the ins and outs of the queues so they don't cause one of the awesome new mandatory objectives to fail.
After all there's this vast store of knowledge immediately available in game that anyone can research and immediately understand all the mechanics of the game right?
If you expect a casual player to waste their one hour a day trying to find information on how to properly build their ship you are nuts. It took me months of pouring through the forum and analyzing builds till I got a clue. Real casual players that just want to play a Star Trek game to role play and have fun won't do that.
They also won't spend 20-30 minutes in a queue only to fail, or get smaller rewards. Hence dead queues.
In your country you have an education system. On STO, you're just left to dangle in the breeze and figure it out yourself after tutorial. You may be lucky and get in with an established fleet with good gear, teachers and members who are willing to help. But, more than likely on your way up to the top of the leet ladder, you'll find yourself in a fleet that just serves as a stop gap or a provisions leech.
If STO had a proper education system in relation to tactics, builds, powers and mechanics, I would agree with you (I'm not talking about the wiki or the academy; they're member created resources). However it doesn't, so you will find that the AVERAGE member (you're not average and neither are your top fleet members/students) will not have your fleet members capabilities.
Cryptic have to cater to the average and what we've seen over the last month or so is them using their metrics to see that the average player is not being catered for. Expect to see more "difficulty nerfs" as they get closer to catering for the average.
You may not like it, but hey; that's what the elite queues are for
Hmm... I just press "K" and there in right upper corner are those two big filter buttons and question mark which says what those buttons do. It take less then minute to check at what captain skills (and consoles) specific BOff skill depend. No need for worldwide research. 75% of knowledge is given in various game information (skill/item description, tooltips, skill filters, etc.) and its enough to come with nice build (and that mean ~10k dps or any other role like tank, heal, cc which will contribute something for a group). Yes you're right that game don't give you those information at plate, there's no pop up window every time you get item telling you "This item will grant you bonus for X, Y and Z skills" but it also not hidden, all you need to do is right-click and info (I'm pretty sure it takes much less then an hour to do that).
You can still fail queued events with good builds/skills.
There is no failure for the PvE story content of the game.
You also are right, even with good build/skills you can fail PvE queue, but it's much less probable.
As about no failure for PvE single player content. I though that in this thread we are talking about team queues not single player game which you can do with shuttle or any other lower tier ship.
i understand why queues are empty; curretly i try (yes i try) to get the maco shield for my new toon. today i tried infected the conduit advanced (failure), khitomer in stasis advanced (failure); + in ISA a guy with the xindi escort was hum! how i could say it; polite.
thus no BNP, and 20 marks for 2 stfs.
btw, yesterday same thing; no BNP and 20 marks
i'm not an sto wizard, when i fire on spheres, it's like firing on walls. 4 players to destroy 1 sphere.
they should change advanced, and add an elite ISA, for the elite players.
After 2 days, i'm really frustrated and disgusted.
Yeah that is the main problem. Who thought the players wanted a npc to have so much hull points and call it fun. I understand the boss having high hull points but frigates with 300k hulls is a joke and not fun lol. As long as advance borg missions scale to 60 when it is not elite content it is unbalanced and a waste of time.
They should of left the queues alone and added elite queues for level 60. They added more npcs to mission which I don't mind but the increase in hp made it stupid. If they wanted to increase hp on npc why add more to mission? Look at Korfez the enemy has high hp but the ships you need to defend don't lol. How is that fair? The worst thing is they didn't figure in time to do mission with high hp npc to an average dps to me. Look at BDN you need to cover 3 spots with 5 ships lol. Sure if you have a good ship you can cover 1 spot alone. But the main problem is taking the 3 dreadnoughts out to get bonus because timer way to short for normal to me.
Look at BDN you need to cover 3 spots with 5 ships lol. Sure if you have a good ship you can cover 1 spot alone. But the main problem is taking the 3 dreadnoughts out to get bonus because timer way to short for normal to me.
And this is where should thinking and tactics start. Actually you don't need to defend/eliminate everything on map, especially in second and third wave. Fallback a little, send of borg ships as they spawn and let Borg, Undine and Voth fight each other. Your objective is to free borg, not to destroy enemy.
And this is where should thinking and tactics start. Actually you don't need to defend/eliminate everything on map, especially in second and third wave. Fallback a little, send of borg ships as they spawn and let Borg, Undine and Voth fight each other. Your objective is to free borg, not to destroy enemy.
That I know I can do 1 spot by myself with no problems but your team doesn't have time to take out 3 dreadnoughts for bonus if they don't have high dps ships in normal lol. Granted some could work on thier dps but this is normal (ofcourse they set normal to 50 which is the old endgame level). They should of left normal at level 45 and there was no need of raising it to 50.
Yeah the old normal was easy for endgamers but normal was the stepping stone for learning those missions. When ever they added a new mission I would do normal until I got it down.
My fleet used to use normal to train new members tactics on stf becuase some new members might not have the dps to do missions. But now you need at least 3 people with good dps to get rewards for doing them. lol I remember only having 1 ship having good dps to get through missions in normal for training. lol
I know the reason I don't play PVE's anymore is because Captain Geko has messed it up so bad that when you actually get into a PVE someone messes up and its over within 10 seconds you get 12 marks and kicked out.
It sucks, I hate it. I loved this game now its a cesspit of despair when I go to log in and no one listens to our complaints and no one even acknowledges that we have a problem with the changes, they just gloss over it with PR vomit and say "Its the most successful expansion we've ever made!" yet they omit that it is "the most successful expansion we've ever made that's pissed off most of our player base."
It totally breaks my heart and I am so angry!
This massive egomaniac has driven away practically ALL of my friends and fleetmates and he sits there arrogant as **** and thinks he doesn't have to answer for it.
If Perfect World Entertainment wants to make money they should set up a stand where you pay $1 to kick him in the nuts! I'd be there all day every day!
Empty queues is a bug. In fact, DR is a success, lots of people plays the queued missions, and everything is awesome.
Now, please get back to the grind. Remember, every time you spot on the forum, is time not spent grinding ! Your costly and random upgrades are waiting for you, alongside dozen of other grind !
And if you ever need dilithium, insert your credit card, Cryptic will help you with that !
That I know I can do 1 spot by myself with no problems but your team doesn't have time to take out 3 dreadnoughts for bonus if they don't have high dps ships in normal lol.
As you said it's bonus, it doesn't mean that everyone should be able to get it. What do you mean by "high dps ships" in normal? 4k? 5k? This is enough to do any normal queue with bonuses, and is easily obtainable and in reach of any casual if he/she only want. Don't want to be good enough to get bonus? Then forget about getting it.
I know the reason I don't play PVE's anymore is because Captain Geko has messed it up so bad that when you actually get into a PVE someone messes up and its over within 10 seconds you get 12 marks and kicked out.
It sucks, I hate it. I loved this game now its a cesspit of despair when I go to log in and no one listens to our complaints and no one even acknowledges that we have a problem with the changes, they just gloss over it with PR vomit and say "Its the most successful expansion we've ever made!" yet they omit that it is "the most successful expansion we've ever made that's pissed off most of our player base."
It totally breaks my heart and I am so angry!
This massive egomaniac has driven away practically ALL of my friends and fleetmates and he sits there arrogant as **** and thinks he doesn't have to answer for it.
If Perfect World Entertainment wants to make money they should set up a stand where you pay $1 to kick him in the nuts! I'd be there all day every day!
As you said it's bonus, it doesn't mean that everyone should be able to get it. What do you mean by "high dps ships" in normal? 4k? 5k? This is enough to do any normal queue with bonuses, and is easily obtainable and in reach of any casual if he/she only want. Don't want to be good enough to get bonus? Then forget about getting it.
Nevermind I guess you don't understand the point about doing normal and don't pug much in game. If you have pugged a lot before DR you would of noticed the big difference after DR. If the missions are not doable in pug it is unbalanced to me. The idea that after DR most players don't know how or don't care is stupid if you believe that. To me when DR came out we all hit a wall and could not do missions. Ok it is several weeks later and some are still having the problems with queues. I know there are some who don't care about the mission and are trying to leech off the rest. But that is a small number of players and most who join want to do mission not fail.
Yeah I know it is easy to blame others on the fail. But is it thier fault that the game was poorly designed and did not figure in lower dps players in missions. No I don't think so it is the game designers fault to me. Normal should be doable with players with less than 4k dps (if they kept it at level 45 I bet there would be no problems). I also bet if they kept advance at level 50 it would help a lot also. Then have elite for level 60 for those who want it really hard lol.
If Perfect World Entertainment wants to make money they should set up a stand where you pay $1 to kick him in the nuts! I'd be there all day every day!
Someone start like a $100k Kickstarter to do this. I will personally donate a measurable percentage.
My guess is "hope" keeps people not playing but posting on the forums. For others, its a path of sad realization and closure. Grieving takes time. The worst "haters" here love the game, or did at some point.
And this is where should thinking and tactics start. Actually you don't need to defend/eliminate everything on map, especially in second and third wave. Fallback a little, send of borg ships as they spawn and let Borg, Undine and Voth fight each other. Your objective is to free borg, not to destroy enemy.
At which point the disconnected ships get stuck in a rift and are blown up, unless you can sneak by the others and they don't shoot you at the worst possible time which isn't likely to happen.
Not to mention that enough ships might not spawn to get 15 per section, which means its unwinnable on advanced.
Not to mention that enough ships might not spawn to get 15 per section, which means its unwinnable on advanced.
This is the real problem now with this mission. In the 2nd and 3rd waves I am only seeing the cube spawn not the group of 3 or 4 probes or spheres. I would say this is almost certainly a bug. This requires the group to cover all 3 zones to barely make it - usually by less than 10 seconds. Good luck Pugging that.
There is also no way for 1 player to free 15 ships (or 3 in azure or 6 in Rhiho Station) So there is no way to pug it. Before I quit this mission I had gathered quite a few tricks to not be interrupted and could free between 8 and 12 ships depending on the wave. Guess what. I have never successfully pugged that mission. The other 4 have never freed enough - often not even 3 ships between them.
It gets to a point where you just can't beat your head into a wall anymore.
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."
Nevermind I guess you don't understand the point about doing normal and don't pug much in game. If you have pugged a lot before DR you would of noticed the big difference after DR. If the missions are not doable in pug it is unbalanced to me. The idea that after DR most players don't know how or don't care is stupid if you believe that. To me when DR came out we all hit a wall and could not do missions. Ok it is several weeks later and some are still having the problems with queues. I know there are some who don't care about the mission and are trying to leech off the rest. But that is a small number of players and most who join want to do mission not fail.
Yeah I know it is easy to blame others on the fail. But is it thier fault that the game was poorly designed and did not figure in lower dps players in missions. No I don't think so it is the game designers fault to me. Normal should be doable with players with less than 4k dps (if they kept it at level 45 I bet there would be no problems). I also bet if they kept advance at level 50 it would help a lot also. Then have elite for level 60 for those who want it really hard lol.
This is the real problem now with this mission. In the 2nd and 3rd waves I am only seeing the cube spawn not the group of 3 or 4 probes or spheres. I would say this is almost certainly a bug. This requires the group to cover all 3 zones to barely make it - usually by less than 10 seconds. Good luck Pugging that.
There is also no way for 1 player to free 15 ships (or 3 in azure or 6 in Rhiho Station) So there is no way to pug it. Before I quit this mission I had gathered quite a few tricks to not be interrupted and could free between 8 and 12 ships depending on the wave. Guess what. I have never successfully pugged that mission. The other 4 have never freed enough - often not even 3 ships between them.
It gets to a point where you just can't beat your head into a wall anymore.
So it's devs and game fault that only tactic and idea how to solve a problem/mission for average PUG is pure force? Did you ever try to contact rest of your PUG team after mission just to say what went wrong and how could they change tactic next time to get more success chance? Those queues are team missions so as long as bigger part of the team don't have any idea what to do other then fire-at-everything you will fail, and it's exactly how it should work. Azure adv is doable with pug, if you and at least two other players understand what is the real objective int his mission, freeing romulan ships, not destroying tholians. Is this really game and devs fault that pug instead freeing those ships want to destroy everything?
The non-optional timers + the uber HP were meant to box in the players .
No going forward no going back, thus the only way to seemingly go was up(grade) .
The post this week by Geko was just a flashlight pointing to the above in case we were too stupid to realize that we were boxed in .
... and that is Cryptic's current approach to the OP's problem ...
So it's devs and game fault that only tactic and idea how to solve a problem/mission for average PUG is pure force? Did you ever try to contact rest of your PUG team after mission just to say what went wrong and how could they change tactic next time to get more success chance? Those queues are team missions so as long as bigger part of the team don't have any idea what to do other then fire-at-everything you will fail, and it's exactly how it should work. Azure adv is doable with pug, if you and at least two other players understand what is the real objective int his mission, freeing romulan ships, not destroying tholians. Is this really game and devs fault that pug instead freeing those ships want to destroy everything?
good luck with that, professor. it took 3 years to get people to learn ISE - and then only because it got easy enough with high dps person on the team to save it. Do you really think anyone will be around in 3 years to finally figure out borg disconnected? get real. If you want the game to be here in 3 years or even by this summer these failqueues have to be changed. We shall see come March what will be.
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."
good luck with that, professor. it took 3 years to get people to learn ISE - and then only because it got easy enough with high dps person on the team to save it. Do you really think anyone will be around in 3 years to finally figure out borg disconnected? get real. If you want the game to be here in 3 years or even by this summer these failqueues have to be changed. We shall see come March what will be.
Pretty much this, most people really do think they're doing it right, and a lot of people probably don't even have their chat open. I think short of standing in front of them so they can see the speech bubbles or pming them saying they're not doing it right they probably won't get the message.
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
good luck with that, professor. it took 3 years to get people to learn ISE - and then only because it got easy enough with high dps person on the team to save it. Do you really think anyone will be around in 3 years to finally figure out borg disconnected? get real. If you want the game to be here in 3 years or even by this summer these failqueues have to be changed. We shall see come March what will be.
Pretty much this, most people really do think they're doing it right, and a lot of people probably don't even have their chat open. I think short of standing in front of them so they can see the speech bubbles or pming them saying they're not doing it right they probably won't get the message.
It's true that you wan't change how every player do queues. But even if you manege to teach 10% of them what they do wrong and why they fail missions, it is 10% more players how give you chance to complete mission. He/she may even later go and do that missions with his/her fleet/friends and show them how to not fail.
Therein lies the problem though - those 'wizards' are likely spent lots of money to get to where they were/are. It's natural that the Dev's would pay attention to players who throw money at the game.
As it was said before, those who do 60k+ DPS came by any content as easily as before and saying that devs change content for them to give a challenge is silly.
To make good enough build to get through adv queses you don't have to spend single $ or play for years. All you need to do is spend few minutes at collecting in game data and then connecting dots: what you want your build do -> what BOffs skills you should use (and in what order, and that is very important) to get that function -> what your captain tree skills (and what items) strengthen BOff. Most of your "firepower" (I would say ~80%) come from those simple steps. Other 20% came from how you fly (positioning vs enemy, needed time to get in fire range, etc.) or what grade gear you use.
One of my fleet-mates start playing STO, his first MMO, less then 2 months ago, and with those steps did temporary build based on drops and episodes rewards good enough to contribute to team and finish adv STF's, while he gather fund and items (some rep, some exchange, some fleet) to polish his build and get every thing from it. And all he "paid" (dil=>ZEN) for in STO was removing 10M EC cap.
But the real issue here was that very tiny minority of the players were pushing the game to the limits. I'm talking the Wizards of STO type of players, those who have such powerful builds that even now they are still throwing out 125K DPS runs despite the increases in HPs and nerfs all over the place.
What was going on pre-DR was not indicative of the overwhelming majority of the players.
I'm not saying the STFs weren't too easy i'm just saying that how most of us played was not at the level that required the huge difficulty buff they threw at us.
The issue isn't really with the Wizards of STO, they are just a small subset of the players who really the Dev's should be talking with about how they maximise and abuse the systems put into the game to make the best DPS build they can. That way the dev's can balance it due to the feedback from them in a more efficient manner.
That also doesn't mean that every difficulty needs to become a DPS sponge. I've said this many times before but rebalancing properly can occur within the current framework and it would be relatively simple to do, just cost a bit of time and testing.
So if the minority who were cake-walking the content was the part of the community the devs were watching to see how the game worked out then that is bad news for the rest of us.
They are still pushing the DPS limits past 125K so where does that leave the rest of us if they are who the devs listen to most?
The Elite levels should be available for the top end players. It gets boring if things are too simple. It gives people something to aim for. However if there were some sample builds to help guide players as they go through the game instead of having to go searching Reddit and other places to get the information needed, things would probably be easier on the players who aren't at the Wizard level. I agree the balance of the Advanced queue's is totally off, but there should be a queue setup for 50-59 and have 60 separate, like they do for unlocking the Elite Queue's. Currently the power gap from 50-59 is too great for it to match lvl 60 gear. Either that or have the instances gear rated and add a gear rating system. Kinda like how WoW got around the power creep.
Therein lies the problem though - those 'wizards' are likely spent lots of money to get to where they were/are. It's natural that the Dev's would pay attention to players who throw money at the game.
Yes they do, they put a lot of time and effort into learning the mechanics to defeat them. Most of the players who complain about these guys don't realise the effort they put in. Then get the craps when they can't instantly put out 120K DPS with their newly bought Scimitar and $500 worth of gear for it.
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."
Comments
Is it bad that I fear you're 100% right?! Others may think you're crazy, but I know your mother had you tested.
Do your metrics *today*, Cryptic. Turn yourselves, whilst you still can!
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
After all there's this vast store of knowledge immediately available in game that anyone can research and immediately understand all the mechanics of the game right?
If you expect a casual player to waste their one hour a day trying to find information on how to properly build their ship you are nuts. It took me months of pouring through the forum and analyzing builds till I got a clue. Real casual players that just want to play a Star Trek game to role play and have fun won't do that.
They also won't spend 20-30 minutes in a queue only to fail, or get smaller rewards. Hence dead queues.
Someone made a decision here without looking at the impact or if acceptable by players.
Just adding new EPIC queues and Level 60 queues would have worked better now looking back.
I guess wishful thinking like all the rest of you that a post here and there will actually get something done. Because my post is not a vent, but hope that someone in Cryptic will rad it and see the light.
Welcome back to reality.
Free Tibet!
The average spender isn't going to fork out much more than they usually do (maybe give themselves a wee bonus to celebrate the launch or celebrate holidays
The less you spend, the quicker it will come
rofl i was speaking about the q's since day one because its a major game design error. The rest of the stuff they have done is passable, but they really messed up on the q system ...they broke it. Everything else is about balance and bugs. Delta content is also pretty decent despite the complaints its good work and makes sense. The q's make no sense at all.
thus no BNP, and 20 marks for 2 stfs.
btw, yesterday same thing; no BNP and 20 marks
i'm not an sto wizard, when i fire on spheres, it's like firing on walls. 4 players to destroy 1 sphere.
they should change advanced, and add an elite ISA, for the elite players.
After 2 days, i'm really frustrated and disgusted.
Hmm... I just press "K" and there in right upper corner are those two big filter buttons and question mark which says what those buttons do. It take less then minute to check at what captain skills (and consoles) specific BOff skill depend. No need for worldwide research. 75% of knowledge is given in various game information (skill/item description, tooltips, skill filters, etc.) and its enough to come with nice build (and that mean ~10k dps or any other role like tank, heal, cc which will contribute something for a group). Yes you're right that game don't give you those information at plate, there's no pop up window every time you get item telling you "This item will grant you bonus for X, Y and Z skills" but it also not hidden, all you need to do is right-click and info (I'm pretty sure it takes much less then an hour to do that).
You also are right, even with good build/skills you can fail PvE queue, but it's much less probable.
As about no failure for PvE single player content. I though that in this thread we are talking about team queues not single player game which you can do with shuttle or any other lower tier ship.
Yeah that is the main problem. Who thought the players wanted a npc to have so much hull points and call it fun. I understand the boss having high hull points but frigates with 300k hulls is a joke and not fun lol. As long as advance borg missions scale to 60 when it is not elite content it is unbalanced and a waste of time.
They should of left the queues alone and added elite queues for level 60. They added more npcs to mission which I don't mind but the increase in hp made it stupid. If they wanted to increase hp on npc why add more to mission? Look at Korfez the enemy has high hp but the ships you need to defend don't lol. How is that fair? The worst thing is they didn't figure in time to do mission with high hp npc to an average dps to me. Look at BDN you need to cover 3 spots with 5 ships lol. Sure if you have a good ship you can cover 1 spot alone. But the main problem is taking the 3 dreadnoughts out to get bonus because timer way to short for normal to me.
And this is where should thinking and tactics start. Actually you don't need to defend/eliminate everything on map, especially in second and third wave. Fallback a little, send of borg ships as they spawn and let Borg, Undine and Voth fight each other. Your objective is to free borg, not to destroy enemy.
That I know I can do 1 spot by myself with no problems but your team doesn't have time to take out 3 dreadnoughts for bonus if they don't have high dps ships in normal lol. Granted some could work on thier dps but this is normal (ofcourse they set normal to 50 which is the old endgame level). They should of left normal at level 45 and there was no need of raising it to 50.
Yeah the old normal was easy for endgamers but normal was the stepping stone for learning those missions. When ever they added a new mission I would do normal until I got it down.
My fleet used to use normal to train new members tactics on stf becuase some new members might not have the dps to do missions. But now you need at least 3 people with good dps to get rewards for doing them. lol I remember only having 1 ship having good dps to get through missions in normal for training. lol
I know the reason I don't play PVE's anymore is because Captain Geko has messed it up so bad that when you actually get into a PVE someone messes up and its over within 10 seconds you get 12 marks and kicked out.
It sucks, I hate it. I loved this game now its a cesspit of despair when I go to log in and no one listens to our complaints and no one even acknowledges that we have a problem with the changes, they just gloss over it with PR vomit and say "Its the most successful expansion we've ever made!" yet they omit that it is "the most successful expansion we've ever made that's pissed off most of our player base."
It totally breaks my heart and I am so angry!
This massive egomaniac has driven away practically ALL of my friends and fleetmates and he sits there arrogant as **** and thinks he doesn't have to answer for it.
If Perfect World Entertainment wants to make money they should set up a stand where you pay $1 to kick him in the nuts! I'd be there all day every day!
Now, please get back to the grind. Remember, every time you spot on the forum, is time not spent grinding ! Your costly and random upgrades are waiting for you, alongside dozen of other grind !
And if you ever need dilithium, insert your credit card, Cryptic will help you with that !
As you said it's bonus, it doesn't mean that everyone should be able to get it. What do you mean by "high dps ships" in normal? 4k? 5k? This is enough to do any normal queue with bonuses, and is easily obtainable and in reach of any casual if he/she only want. Don't want to be good enough to get bonus? Then forget about getting it.
^^ I got a chuckle out of your post.
Sweet sig, btw. I love pastel!
Nevermind I guess you don't understand the point about doing normal and don't pug much in game. If you have pugged a lot before DR you would of noticed the big difference after DR. If the missions are not doable in pug it is unbalanced to me. The idea that after DR most players don't know how or don't care is stupid if you believe that. To me when DR came out we all hit a wall and could not do missions. Ok it is several weeks later and some are still having the problems with queues. I know there are some who don't care about the mission and are trying to leech off the rest. But that is a small number of players and most who join want to do mission not fail.
Yeah I know it is easy to blame others on the fail. But is it thier fault that the game was poorly designed and did not figure in lower dps players in missions. No I don't think so it is the game designers fault to me. Normal should be doable with players with less than 4k dps (if they kept it at level 45 I bet there would be no problems). I also bet if they kept advance at level 50 it would help a lot also. Then have elite for level 60 for those who want it really hard lol.
Someone start like a $100k Kickstarter to do this. I will personally donate a measurable percentage.
At which point the disconnected ships get stuck in a rift and are blown up, unless you can sneak by the others and they don't shoot you at the worst possible time which isn't likely to happen.
Not to mention that enough ships might not spawn to get 15 per section, which means its unwinnable on advanced.
This is the real problem now with this mission. In the 2nd and 3rd waves I am only seeing the cube spawn not the group of 3 or 4 probes or spheres. I would say this is almost certainly a bug. This requires the group to cover all 3 zones to barely make it - usually by less than 10 seconds. Good luck Pugging that.
There is also no way for 1 player to free 15 ships (or 3 in azure or 6 in Rhiho Station) So there is no way to pug it. Before I quit this mission I had gathered quite a few tricks to not be interrupted and could free between 8 and 12 ships depending on the wave. Guess what. I have never successfully pugged that mission. The other 4 have never freed enough - often not even 3 ships between them.
It gets to a point where you just can't beat your head into a wall anymore.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
RnD and upgrade needs less RNG. Less lottery. Something has to change.
So it's devs and game fault that only tactic and idea how to solve a problem/mission for average PUG is pure force? Did you ever try to contact rest of your PUG team after mission just to say what went wrong and how could they change tactic next time to get more success chance? Those queues are team missions so as long as bigger part of the team don't have any idea what to do other then fire-at-everything you will fail, and it's exactly how it should work. Azure adv is doable with pug, if you and at least two other players understand what is the real objective int his mission, freeing romulan ships, not destroying tholians. Is this really game and devs fault that pug instead freeing those ships want to destroy everything?
No going forward no going back, thus the only way to seemingly go was up(grade) .
The post this week by Geko was just a flashlight pointing to the above in case we were too stupid to realize that we were boxed in .
... and that is Cryptic's current approach to the OP's problem ...
good luck with that, professor. it took 3 years to get people to learn ISE - and then only because it got easy enough with high dps person on the team to save it. Do you really think anyone will be around in 3 years to finally figure out borg disconnected? get real. If you want the game to be here in 3 years or even by this summer these failqueues have to be changed. We shall see come March what will be.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Pretty much this, most people really do think they're doing it right, and a lot of people probably don't even have their chat open. I think short of standing in front of them so they can see the speech bubbles or pming them saying they're not doing it right they probably won't get the message.
It's true that you wan't change how every player do queues. But even if you manege to teach 10% of them what they do wrong and why they fail missions, it is 10% more players how give you chance to complete mission. He/she may even later go and do that missions with his/her fleet/friends and show them how to not fail.
As it was said before, those who do 60k+ DPS came by any content as easily as before and saying that devs change content for them to give a challenge is silly.
To make good enough build to get through adv queses you don't have to spend single $ or play for years. All you need to do is spend few minutes at collecting in game data and then connecting dots: what you want your build do -> what BOffs skills you should use (and in what order, and that is very important) to get that function -> what your captain tree skills (and what items) strengthen BOff. Most of your "firepower" (I would say ~80%) come from those simple steps. Other 20% came from how you fly (positioning vs enemy, needed time to get in fire range, etc.) or what grade gear you use.
One of my fleet-mates start playing STO, his first MMO, less then 2 months ago, and with those steps did temporary build based on drops and episodes rewards good enough to contribute to team and finish adv STF's, while he gather fund and items (some rep, some exchange, some fleet) to polish his build and get every thing from it. And all he "paid" (dil=>ZEN) for in STO was removing 10M EC cap.
That also doesn't mean that every difficulty needs to become a DPS sponge. I've said this many times before but rebalancing properly can occur within the current framework and it would be relatively simple to do, just cost a bit of time and testing.
The Elite levels should be available for the top end players. It gets boring if things are too simple. It gives people something to aim for. However if there were some sample builds to help guide players as they go through the game instead of having to go searching Reddit and other places to get the information needed, things would probably be easier on the players who aren't at the Wizard level. I agree the balance of the Advanced queue's is totally off, but there should be a queue setup for 50-59 and have 60 separate, like they do for unlocking the Elite Queue's. Currently the power gap from 50-59 is too great for it to match lvl 60 gear. Either that or have the instances gear rated and add a gear rating system. Kinda like how WoW got around the power creep.
Yes they do, they put a lot of time and effort into learning the mechanics to defeat them. Most of the players who complain about these guys don't realise the effort they put in. Then get the craps when they can't instantly put out 120K DPS with their newly bought Scimitar and $500 worth of gear for it.
"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."