Is that breaking 10k at the top or 10k at the bottom?
With a decent group or your average pug? pug groups, top, Only so much you can do when the groups take 6-8 minutes. 8.5k-9k is fairly comfortable for that so I'm not taking it into advanced with pure pugs. A less lazy pilot than me could probbaly break 10k in pugs with that, I don't fly anything near optimally.
Also depends on parser settings I suppose, I've had people clock me well over 11k on a regular basis.
That's a nice beamboat. My problem is I don't like playing like that.
I enjoyed having the 360 turrets in the back, with two beams and a turret or torpedo in front. I *like* running a ship like that. Its fun, for me. I could play like that in PVE and on missions without blowing to pieces. It got me from level 1 to level 50.
Then Delta Rising came out. I had to rebuild my ship from scratch, turning it into a beamboat. Remember when I said I don't like playing like that? Well, now to even keep up I have to play the game in a way I don't like.
You can probbaly break 10k with the right ship. Want to juggle that many different weapon types, find something with at least a lt com tac slot and the ability to do aux to bat or with just a silly number of tac slots (defiant). It'll never be optimal, it'll take a bit of tweaking, you'll probbaly wont be able to carry an iffy team in it, but you'll be able to break 10k. If you somehow can't break 10k in DR then you never made the cut off for STFs before it. You might have been in them, your team might have succeeded but its because it used to be so easy for one person to carry the team, not because your build was good enough.
Running around with turrets in the front and beams and torpedos is not how the game expects you to play at all. That's is the equivalent of a warrior running around in mage gear. If ya wanna do it, the game might let you and go ahead, just don't complain when you can't tank the raid.
My main ship (Vesta) was built for pvp tanking. This happened to work just fine on Oct 13th. Since then I have changed it somewhat to go from around 15k to 25k because I felt I had to to keep playing. Sacrificed some of the absurd defense for offense. The purpose is to be able to help iffy pug groups solve various missions with various avoid interrupts and controls. This is because I have no interest in sitting around for hours waiting for someone in a chat group to start a mission that I want to play.
Sadly I just lost my only playing partner to the last round of queue buffs so it puts a damper. However, I will drive on until the lights go off.
I took a look at what players other than myself were doing in ISA and came across these percentages from the public queues...some rounding up.
63.19% were doing less than 10k.
36.81% were doing 10k or more.
52.08% were doing 8k or less.
7.7k was the "magic" 50% number. 50% of the folks were doing 7.7k or less.
So I'd want to double that...7.7 / 0.5 = 15.4k or so. 21.5% above/78.5% below.
That would be my goal number...the number with some buffer. So giving it a range of +/-2.5, then I can take a look at how I'm doing compared that goal.
And I'm hitting it around 39% of the time, too high 47%, and too low 14%.
MMOs are so terrible now in large part because they've been trying to cater to the lowest common denominator for so long.
I like what Cryptic has done with the reward structure. Now, if they would improve the quality of the content, that would be great. And excessive amounts of bug testing would be greatly appreciated.
Running around with turrets in the front and beams and torpedos is not how the game expects you to play at all. That's is the equivalent of a warrior running around in mage gear. If ya wanna do it, the game might let you and go ahead, just don't complain when you can't tank the raid.
Except they do, and MMOs are worse even than when they were based on standing around at a spawn point with everyone else, hoping that you or your group manages to tag the spawn before someone else does.
Probably intentional. Just some cursory reading I found some numbers suggesting that on average the Hardcore Gamers make up <10% of the average F2P MMO's population, but account for >90% for the spending.
I don't doubt that's heavily skewed by the genre's trend towards power progression rather than content "progression."
I wonder what those numbers are like for LotRO (the biggest named MMO I know of that sells or sold content at any meaningful rate).
Or what they'd be like for this game if, years back, Cryptic had consciously chosen to target the RPers (and yes, the ERPers); that's a group that, while probably difficult to work with from a customer service viewpoint, is probably the most easily satisfied between the trinity of RPers, hardcore gamers, and the detritus that calls itself casual but whines like infants when anything that can't be botted is released while white knighting with complete obliviousness whenever legitimate complaints are raised.
we need an AI that favors different strategies depending on what kind of enemy it is. for instance voth are defensive they will try to keep shield up at all costs, while having little offence. the key should be to not allow them to do that. a tachyon beam should be devastating against voth since it fundamentally undermines their strategy.
In a more limited application of this, I was considering the other day how weapon type has been underutilized within content design.
I'm sure that, at some point, there was some design philosophy that there should be some sort of parity between weapon types. However, from what I've seen, this led to a different property emerging; enemy parity.
Put simply, I don't know of any enemy which is particularly susceptible to one energy weapon type over another. It's my understanding that may not always have been the case, but it certainly seems to be the case currently.
I'm actually surprised they haven't picked up on the fact that they could milk the whales for upgrades on every energy weapon type instead of just the 1-2 any normal player would invest in. And loadouts, because you know whales can't be asked to hand-swap all that gear. This would actually give enough use to loadouts that even average players might purchase some extra slots, and it could help mitigate some of the rush to push DPS even higher, by releasing content that, within its limited scope, resets the power curve to a friendlier entry level.
On a slightly related note, they actually seem to be heading in the right direction regarding ship parity; science has effectively been salvaged from where it was when I previously played (after science as CC was nerfed into the ground), and even cruisers have had love thrown their way. As with weapons, parity in damage between ships in the sanitized environment of non-contextual theorycrafting is extremely important from the player perspective, and absolutely vital when you've allowed the trinity to become as diminished in importance as it is here.
I agree, I do not want to have to sit with a spreadsheet and calculator trying to figure out which weapons to use, which consoles support which weapons, which rep set to use with certain weapons/consoles ect.
That part's like 90% obviousness. The 10% that isn't would be min-maxing secondary stats for the purpose of things such as boff skill scaling (or min-maxing for the purpose of "exploiting," and I'm using that term very loosely). Not only is that somewhat less intuitive, it's also the area of the game where the tooltips fail the hardest and unintentional bugs in the mechanics become of increasing significance.
But, if you can get the first 90% down, the part where you look at a 20% CritD mod and say that's a heck of a lot better than a 2.5% proc rate, then you're well on your way.
"Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society." - Aristotle
Though I do believe that content should be challenging too. Sometimes the challenge is the storyline, others it's the interactive part (Dust to Dust platform puzzle is a good example there), but content doesn't have to be related to the ultimate DPS setup to be challenging.
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."
Somebody demands that I change anything while I'm off dorking around by myself? They can go TRIBBLE themselves.
Somebody demands that I'm prepared for group content where I'm one of five to ten players on a team? Why would they have to? Shouldn't I be demanding that of myself in the first place? That if I'm going to hook up with four to nine other players, that I'm going to bring what's necessary to do it?
So yeah, for folks that don't demand that of themselves and complain about others that in turn do demand that...yeah, I'd say it's a question of principle.
I agree. If you are part of a team you must at least try to do good. If you don't, you're not satisfying a minimum requirement to considered being the member of a team.
If you're not good yet, you can ask for advice, and listen to it.
You're expecting the other people in your team to make the mission you're in a fun and rewarding experience, they can expect the same from you.
What you do when you're flying alone, that's your thing and no one gets to critisize that.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
These are the numbers I've seen in ISA as well, except that I've not happened to parse when there was a >30.
Before, I could work with 4 less than 5's. Now I need 4 5 to 8's. I always beat the ISA timer with such a group. But before I changed up my ship I couldn't.
The timers are a big irritation. I like them sometime but not every time. Advanced difficulty level is fine - maybe could even be harder - if the darn timer is removed. Then when I'm in the mood for a timer I do elite. All of these 4 months of complaining has been a waste of time. I think we will see the true effect these changes have had on the game in March/April. If the numbers of logins are so low they alarm someone important there might be some changes to advanced. Maybe even not then. I will be quite surprised to see a 6th anniversary - pleasantly so.
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."
Comments
With a decent group or your average pug? pug groups, top, Only so much you can do when the groups take 6-8 minutes. 8.5k-9k is fairly comfortable for that so I'm not taking it into advanced with pure pugs. A less lazy pilot than me could probbaly break 10k in pugs with that, I don't fly anything near optimally.
Also depends on parser settings I suppose, I've had people clock me well over 11k on a regular basis.
You can probbaly break 10k with the right ship. Want to juggle that many different weapon types, find something with at least a lt com tac slot and the ability to do aux to bat or with just a silly number of tac slots (defiant). It'll never be optimal, it'll take a bit of tweaking, you'll probbaly wont be able to carry an iffy team in it, but you'll be able to break 10k. If you somehow can't break 10k in DR then you never made the cut off for STFs before it. You might have been in them, your team might have succeeded but its because it used to be so easy for one person to carry the team, not because your build was good enough.
Running around with turrets in the front and beams and torpedos is not how the game expects you to play at all. That's is the equivalent of a warrior running around in mage gear. If ya wanna do it, the game might let you and go ahead, just don't complain when you can't tank the raid.
I took a look at what players other than myself were doing in ISA and came across these percentages from the public queues...some rounding up.
<=2: 4.17%
2<=5: 25%
5<=8: 27.78%
8<=10: 10.42%
10<=15: 15.28%
15<=20: 4.86%
20<=25: 6.25%
25<=30: 4.17%
>30: 6.94%
63.19% were doing less than 10k.
36.81% were doing 10k or more.
52.08% were doing 8k or less.
7.7k was the "magic" 50% number. 50% of the folks were doing 7.7k or less.
So I'd want to double that...7.7 / 0.5 = 15.4k or so. 21.5% above/78.5% below.
That would be my goal number...the number with some buffer. So giving it a range of +/-2.5, then I can take a look at how I'm doing compared that goal.
And I'm hitting it around 39% of the time, too high 47%, and too low 14%.
Some challenge is a good thing.
MMOs are so terrible now in large part because they've been trying to cater to the lowest common denominator for so long.
I like what Cryptic has done with the reward structure. Now, if they would improve the quality of the content, that would be great. And excessive amounts of bug testing would be greatly appreciated.
But, don't go back to LCD development.
Except they do, and MMOs are worse even than when they were based on standing around at a spawn point with everyone else, hoping that you or your group manages to tag the spawn before someone else does.
I don't doubt that's heavily skewed by the genre's trend towards power progression rather than content "progression."
I wonder what those numbers are like for LotRO (the biggest named MMO I know of that sells or sold content at any meaningful rate).
Or what they'd be like for this game if, years back, Cryptic had consciously chosen to target the RPers (and yes, the ERPers); that's a group that, while probably difficult to work with from a customer service viewpoint, is probably the most easily satisfied between the trinity of RPers, hardcore gamers, and the detritus that calls itself casual but whines like infants when anything that can't be botted is released while white knighting with complete obliviousness whenever legitimate complaints are raised.
In a more limited application of this, I was considering the other day how weapon type has been underutilized within content design.
I'm sure that, at some point, there was some design philosophy that there should be some sort of parity between weapon types. However, from what I've seen, this led to a different property emerging; enemy parity.
Put simply, I don't know of any enemy which is particularly susceptible to one energy weapon type over another. It's my understanding that may not always have been the case, but it certainly seems to be the case currently.
I'm actually surprised they haven't picked up on the fact that they could milk the whales for upgrades on every energy weapon type instead of just the 1-2 any normal player would invest in. And loadouts, because you know whales can't be asked to hand-swap all that gear. This would actually give enough use to loadouts that even average players might purchase some extra slots, and it could help mitigate some of the rush to push DPS even higher, by releasing content that, within its limited scope, resets the power curve to a friendlier entry level.
On a slightly related note, they actually seem to be heading in the right direction regarding ship parity; science has effectively been salvaged from where it was when I previously played (after science as CC was nerfed into the ground), and even cruisers have had love thrown their way. As with weapons, parity in damage between ships in the sanitized environment of non-contextual theorycrafting is extremely important from the player perspective, and absolutely vital when you've allowed the trinity to become as diminished in importance as it is here.
That part's like 90% obviousness. The 10% that isn't would be min-maxing secondary stats for the purpose of things such as boff skill scaling (or min-maxing for the purpose of "exploiting," and I'm using that term very loosely). Not only is that somewhat less intuitive, it's also the area of the game where the tooltips fail the hardest and unintentional bugs in the mechanics become of increasing significance.
But, if you can get the first 90% down, the part where you look at a 20% CritD mod and say that's a heck of a lot better than a 2.5% proc rate, then you're well on your way.
I wish I could "Like" or otherwise up-vote this comment, because it has so much THIS!
"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."
I agree. If you are part of a team you must at least try to do good. If you don't, you're not satisfying a minimum requirement to considered being the member of a team.
If you're not good yet, you can ask for advice, and listen to it.
You're expecting the other people in your team to make the mission you're in a fun and rewarding experience, they can expect the same from you.
What you do when you're flying alone, that's your thing and no one gets to critisize that.
These are the numbers I've seen in ISA as well, except that I've not happened to parse when there was a >30.
Before, I could work with 4 less than 5's. Now I need 4 5 to 8's. I always beat the ISA timer with such a group. But before I changed up my ship I couldn't.
The timers are a big irritation. I like them sometime but not every time. Advanced difficulty level is fine - maybe could even be harder - if the darn timer is removed. Then when I'm in the mood for a timer I do elite. All of these 4 months of complaining has been a waste of time. I think we will see the true effect these changes have had on the game in March/April. If the numbers of logins are so low they alarm someone important there might be some changes to advanced. Maybe even not then. I will be quite surprised to see a 6th anniversary - pleasantly so.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."