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Mandatory optionals have destroyed PVE queues
mirrorterran
Member Posts: 423 Arc User
I realize it's been said by many others in many other threads but this seriously needs to be rolled back.
We want to be challenged but being told 2 minutes into a mission "Too bad, so sad, you suck" is getting old. I'm in a small fleet and getting a pre-made group together is difficult, and even when we can we still can't get past these optionals. BTW, I easily have some of the best gear available and have played for years, so please don't tell me it's me.
How about a compromise? If you fail the optional you get a nerfed reward but being kicked out entirely is just too dictatorial and NO FUN. Now with you nerfing the handful of missions that people are capable of completing you are going in the absolute wrong direction.
We are here to have fun and command an uber powerful starship...not be scolded and kicked out of a mission.
We want to be challenged but being told 2 minutes into a mission "Too bad, so sad, you suck" is getting old. I'm in a small fleet and getting a pre-made group together is difficult, and even when we can we still can't get past these optionals. BTW, I easily have some of the best gear available and have played for years, so please don't tell me it's me.
How about a compromise? If you fail the optional you get a nerfed reward but being kicked out entirely is just too dictatorial and NO FUN. Now with you nerfing the handful of missions that people are capable of completing you are going in the absolute wrong direction.
We are here to have fun and command an uber powerful starship...not be scolded and kicked out of a mission.
Post edited by mirrorterran on
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The optionals would be fine, if the rest weren't also fubared.
Also, the point was to make them harder which they did.
CRUISERS NEED A 206% HULL BUFF
No. No they didn't. There is a difference.
Savik - Vulcan Fed Temporal Sci
Dahar Masters Fleet: Alphal'Fa - Alien KDF Engineer Qun'pau - Rom/KDF Engineer D'nesh - Orion KDF Scientist Ghen'khan - Liberated KDF Tac
Welcome to StarBug Online - to boldly Bug where no bug has been before!
STO player since November 2013
Btw, is wasn't the "mandatory optionals" that killed the queues. It was Geko and PWE who killed 'em on purpose long time ago...
They don't attack the cube or the spheres when ISA starts.
Four players (mixed fleets and names) fly straight towards the right generators and blow one.
They sit there until the match fails and warp out.
One heck of troll, same thing would have work pre-Dr so why now.
Actually happened to me too, the other day. I asked around in 30k, whether there was perhaps a new Objective I was unaware of, besides not letting probes thru, but nobody thought so. So, yeah, I too would be interested to learn what other conditions can make it fail.
Fact is, the missions didnt get harder. After you had a bit time to adapt to it, they go down nearly as fast as pre-DR. Even in Pugs.
PvP has died at leass 99 times in the last 3 years when you ask the pvp-crowd...
Have to say the changes are pretty horrible towards newer accounts who don't already have the best gear, and a TON of dilith saved from years of farming multiple alts to go ahead and get them all to MK XIV. "Well why not just do normal then till you farm"....Sure, except some mats can only be obtained via advance, or elite. So unless you want to grind EC at the same time you're grinding Dilith and marks to buy tech upgrades instead of crafting you're kinda stuck.
Now I saw the issues even before the recent gear additions that made dps builds skyrocket, where things simply blew up if you looked at it. Some people did have some insane builds with stupid high dmg. An easier way to go about that would've been to look at the gear combinations and see if that dps was working as intended instead of reworking the entire queue system and pooping on a large section of the player base, on top of adding a "troll" form of pve where players can intentionally make you fail.
Slight nerfs to dps builds that were over the top with a "Added" elite form of all queues for the dps elitist who complained about old queues being too easy would've been a much better route.
Atm though even MK XII VR gear is almost useless and you end up being carried by higher end players if you even attempt advance STF's, where before you could contribute decently in MK XII blues...
Frankly, the fail conditions aren't that hard to meet if people know how to play the game. (The Azure Nebula fail condition gets a lot of grief, but if you can't solo a 1 or a 2 in 3 minutes then you shouldn't be in advanced. I was able to save a ship in 2 minutes with a build that I know is parsing at 12K in ISA. And if all 5 players could solo 1's and 2's then saving three ships in three minutes wouldn't be hard at all.)
The problem is that there are people in all pugs who have no clue how to play the game. They play normal where they can just pew pew their way through and assume that advanced is just more pew pew. What I'd like to see is fail conditions in normal, but make them easier (like the 10 probes condition in khitomer space, or make azure nebula fail at normal if you don't free 3 ships in 4 minutes or something like that). That way people would learn to do the missions in normal before hitting advanced.
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Do you remember how optional meant optional in the old Elite?
Cryptic does not recall that.
I second this statement.
There are a number of bugs/problems which seem like they will never be addressed:
The 'anomaly' in viscous.
The Benthans in Korfez
Something maybe with the orb in undine infiltration? (I haven't had this bug myself).
Borg Disconnected in general. Wave 2 and 3 need the small ship spawns that we have in wave 1. I wonder if anyone is aware that they aren't there?
The timer on Azure. This mission is of course a breeze in a premade but the pug success rate is low. Nowhere near the 0.00% of BDA, but still.
3 of these are the only means of obtaining argonite. Argonite is the joker in the shell game deck to try and force R&D pack sales. This is why I don't expect any changes to these.
My overall review is that I personally like the changes. However, they are terrible for the game. So I hope to see them rolled back sometime this March when the player numbers reach an all time low.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Considering the time it's most likely that someone forgot to intercept a probe. Rookie mistake.
As for the mission in my 1st post, I do not recall even seeing probes spawn near the first Tac Cube, so it's just speculation on the cause of failure. Since my KDF fleet is small, my chances of doing a pre-made PUG are poor. Guess I'll just have to be more observant in the FED queues...:rolleyes:
Savik - Vulcan Fed Temporal Sci
Dahar Masters Fleet: Alphal'Fa - Alien KDF Engineer Qun'pau - Rom/KDF Engineer D'nesh - Orion KDF Scientist Ghen'khan - Liberated KDF Tac
Welcome to StarBug Online - to boldly Bug where no bug has been before!
STO player since November 2013
more like problematic reading comprehension.
There are Optional Objectives and Mandatory Objectives.
The Optional Objectives in Normal difficulty turn into Mandatory Objectives in Advanced and Elite.
People are flipping tables because they think the Advanced and Elite missions say "Optional" when they don't.
To answer your question of why now and not pre-DR - is because now you still get 10 marks, before you got nothing. So a troll, with multiple toons, maybe even multiple accounts, can hop into nearly every queue, ruin a bigger reward for everyone else, and still get 10 marks every time - sure you get a cool down, but again - with multiple toons, etc. who cares about a cool down.
Advance was supposed to be old Elite. Old Elite had Optional Objectives, not the Mandatory Objectives it currently is saddled with.
The problem though, is that the now mandatory optionals, still list themselves as optional on the list of objectives.
This is undoubtedly, what is causing the confusion.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
Well and thats one reason why pve has always been a joke and even with the latest changes it is for lots of reasons.
Mandatory Objectives at least make some people think about what they're doing. Should have been mandatory on elite since launch. Also, failing on elite should result in perma death to make it less of a joke (pressuming there'd be some balance and no stupid 1 shots).
Fail on normal PVE = nothing happens
Fail on advanced = ship deleted/resources lost/whatever
Fail once in elite PVE = character deleted
This for sure will like I said require some kind of balancing in the first place.
You sure give the tiny remnants of the PvP crowd a good name.
Bravo sir, bravo.
(It's not like Elite is exactly what's you're whining for or anything...)
One great way to improve your success rate in ANRA is to warp out before the 3 minute mark and queue up again.
But yeah what is up with BDA. These people fail there because they aren't even trying - bunching up on the same side, shooting bad guys instead of freeing ships. This is exactly where they need to put a fail condition into normal level (save 5 ships or something). If someone thinks the point of borg disco is to shoot borg ships (because they don't read the mission objectives), then they'll still fail at normal and will have to learn how to play.
Except they don't actually. That's the thing - people just aren't reading carefully.
IMO, there should be a single player mission available in everyone's journal relating to all of the STFs. Kind of like the holodeck simulator on Bajor. At the end, a score is placed on your performance; with a popup saying "Looks like you're not quite ready for this yet" or "You're ready to assist other captains in this endeavor" depending on how well one does.
It would only make sense. At least to me.
I haven't been in any PVE queues (except maybe one or two event related) since before this change, both because noone is ever around to run them, and because I fing the idea of requiring optionals to be mandatory to be a deal breaker.
In my opinion this has permanently crippled half of sTO.
I will continue to play PVE missions and DOFF and do a few of the events until I run out of content or lose interest.
I really did enjoy some of those queues for awhile (when I could find people to PUG.)
Would they have them for different roles? Would the person fly with some friendly NPCs in a team?