lets give a hand for pug stomping!- its funny how you can track the amount of pug stomping that was going on nightly with the enthusiasm of most of the dino players, they would get in a few matches a night, most of those matches was a walk in the park, they got to high five over how great they were nightly with the occasional 5v5 that was fleet-made/friend-made that actually were set up right, then they would have their long, dragged out, hard fought match walking away with a sense of pride that they felt like they did something and it was a good fight (reality is, if all you can do is wait for the cooldown of 2-3 subnukes to get a kill in the match, then really how the hell is that anything close to a balanced system of powers and abilities in the game, OR what? wait for the other team to slip up after 45 minutes strait, AGAIN, how is that strategy? YOU were never in control of the match if that was the primary ways of getting a kill, "general, we are going to keep pouring troops on the field until the enemy FINALLY screws up, and then hopefully sir, we then may be able to take the hill" BUT HEY! these guys got to push buttons, fly around for a bit, feel like their doing something- they got their wins nightly off the pug stomps so that I guess, is all that it took to keep their interest in the game, TO HELL with options, TO HELL with diversity, TO HELL with fresh players having the tools and the ability to create something that works, TO HELL with all of that, the dino players wanted a cookie cutter pvp experiense where they could build to 1 obvious build, one obvious team makeup, and take it into match after match after match without having to change a thing
The problem here is a snow balling effect that has taken place over the past years of this game. Pre-LoR every single day I used to wake up, Pandas would put together a 5 man and head for the queues, in hopes of finding another fleet doing the same. Back then, you could pop into one of three matches: 1) 100% pugs, 15-0 in 2 mins. 2) Recognizable names that weren't in a fleet but pugged pvp all day, or opvp pugmade. 3) Another fleet on voice comms that will give you a good match. This is when it was actually fun to pvp all day, in a premade. However, groups 3 and to somewhat the same effect group 2 drove group 1 out of the queues entirely. Not for the day. For good. The skill gap was so excessive even from group 1 to group 2 that pugs had no chance. This is a failing of the GAME not the players. This game is so forgiving while leveling. Nothing is taught to you. Diminishing returns in skill trees aren't known to 99.9% of the player base, pvpers included. The skill builds I've seen posted on these forums vary from decent to you need to go back to elementary school level math. Why, because the game fails to teach basic things about itself to new players or players who do not go out of their way to aquire this info.
When I came back from my break, the queues weren't anywhere near what they were. There were 2-3 hour blocks where you could actually catch pops relatively fast. Gone were the pugs from group 1, and now the queue is nothing but group 2 and 3. DR comes along and let me tell you about Pandas standard day. Put together 5 man, enter queues, 15-0 3-4 times in a row. IC finds out we're in the queue. 5v5 panda vs ic daily match. Everyone goes back to PvE and grinding after. This....wasn't fun....at all. Every day was the same as the last. You can blame premades "pugstomping" all you want...but at the end of the day, the pugstomping only occurs because of a failure to educate the player base on how to play the game besides: 1) have recluses to carry you 2) have faw 3) sit still engage macro. Then again, educating the playerbase in general would require the devs to actually learn to play their own game on the ACTUAL server, not in an isolated dev test server where all the spahgetti code hasn't yet ruined 90% of the game, in complete ignorance to any issues going on with holodeck, let alone pvp.
Improved Command Frequency and dropping that out every 5 minutes.
lol.... just as lol as i seemed to forget about that they altered the big-ship issue (got reminded on over in that thread).
not sure about uni-cons though. and i don't think i'm about to find out myself .
[...]
This is a failing of the GAME not the players. This game is so forgiving while leveling. Nothing is taught to you. Diminishing returns in skill trees aren't known to 99.9% of the player base, pvpers included. The skill builds I've seen posted on these forums vary from decent to you need to go back to elementary school level math. Why, because the game fails to teach basic things about itself to new players or players who do not go out of their way to aquire this info.
[...]
so much this! and it became worse, at least regarding op-toys and abilities in the hands of players that are half-way knowing what they're doing. it's a designed to cater the casuals.
lol.... just as lol as i seemed to forget about that they altered the big-ship issue (got reminded on over in that thread).
not sure about uni-cons though. and i don't think i'm about to find out myself .
Oh, I was just thinking about the Command Officer trait - I didn't even consider whether any additional CD reduction was possible on Fleet Support...hrmm, is 5 minutes the min CD on that or can it actually go lower? Work in some Reciprocity and All Hands on Deck with some 3pc Contractual.
so much this! and it became worse, at least regarding op-toys and abilities in the hands of players that are half-way knowing what they're doing.
To an extent though, wouldn't a "goal" when dealing with an "extremely casual non-gamer player" be to create that sense of fun...which could be created through toy saturation to get folks to a certain level (which also in turn would result in folks doing ludicrous things in the DPS Channels and PvP)...?
Don't know if you've heard, but Surgical Strikes + Rock & Roll completely defeats FBP, and all other damage reflect powers in STO. You can kill the FBPer with SS, and R&R to escape any reflected damage.
While I agree with what you say, the one using the feedback pulse could also use rock n roll to avoid most of the buffed damage, like when facing an "apa+ss3" volley (firing cycle).
If two smart pilots are head to head, they could technically trade rock n roll for rock n roll all afternoon. (In a 1 on 1 scenario).
Oh, I was just thinking about the Command Officer trait - I didn't even consider whether any additional CD reduction was possible on Fleet Support...hrmm, is 5 minutes the min CD on that or can it actually go lower? Work in some Reciprocity and All Hands on Deck with some 3pc Contractual.
no idea mate. i do think it's even 10 mins, but with 5 on teams cycling it.... don't ask me about those command-stuff. i read it through once and thought like: yay, now it's surely dead jim .
To an extent though, wouldn't a "goal" when dealing with an "extremely casual non-gamer player" be to create that sense of fun...which could be created through toy saturation to get folks to a certain level (which also in turn would result in folks doing ludicrous things in the DPS Channels and PvP)...?
i think they would've screwed the gameplay way less up if they'd just would have created some decent tutorials on skill-building, game-mechanics and synergies.
i'd really liked to see a synergies chart for everyone f.e., that makes it possible to see any change on build with one look .
when i think off a good tutorial in which a dev leads the player to where he wants him to be referring on ingame knowledge, i somehow always think off the first operation flashpoint (cold war crisis).
surgical strike got a fix on the tribble notes, wont be able to fire it from cloak here pretty soon so thats a good thing
but lets face facts here, they are going to chip away at some of the broken stuff from t6 over the next couple months and even if they do all that the dino players are still not going to be happy because its not escorts online anymore and never will be again
the claim to fame in the past was:
most the boff powers sucked/didnt work good for pvp OR pve- so you had this knowledge divide between the vets and the rookies, those that knew already what worked great and pvp and flew it vs those noobs that were wasting time trying to make junk boff combos work and getting killed in the cues daily for it, (sure, sure, the noobs would bump into other noobs and see their "boff combo" result in a kill or two, but in the end, the game was so broken from the start that if you didnt do the cookie cutter escort/ heal boat/ off-heal sci and ran a team with it, short of 2-3 subnukes your team was unstoppable in the cues vs the pugs)
pay to win was never better- get a bug, that simple, learn to fly a bug, even easier, apply cookie cutter build and get on a team that knows how to cross heal= win vs all but other likewise teams (and then the match would drag on for hours LOL thats a big F for fun), teamfortress, recluses, adapted battle crabs, timeships, all those did were re-enforce the abuse of the heal mechanics in the game and take advantage of a superior escort with no peer, THIS went on by the way for years in this game
lets give a hand for pug stomping!- its funny how you can track the amount of pug stomping that was going on nightly with the enthusiasm of most of the dino players, they would get in a few matches a night, most of those matches was a walk in the park, they got to high five over how great they were nightly with the occasional 5v5 that was fleet-made/friend-made that actually were set up right, then they would have their long, dragged out, hard fought match walking away with a sense of pride that they felt like they did something and it was a good fight (reality is, if all you can do is wait for the cooldown of 2-3 subnukes to get a kill in the match, then really how the hell is that anything close to a balanced system of powers and abilities in the game, OR what? wait for the other team to slip up after 45 minutes strait, AGAIN, how is that strategy? YOU were never in control of the match if that was the primary ways of getting a kill, "general, we are going to keep pouring troops on the field until the enemy FINALLY screws up, and then hopefully sir, we then may be able to take the hill" BUT HEY! these guys got to push buttons, fly around for a bit, feel like their doing something- they got their wins nightly off the pug stomps so that I guess, is all that it took to keep their interest in the game, TO HELL with options, TO HELL with diversity, TO HELL with fresh players having the tools and the ability to create something that works, TO HELL with all of that, the dino players wanted a cookie cutter pvp experiense where they could build to 1 obvious build, one obvious team makeup, and take it into match after match after match without having to change a thing
FINAL PART : LOL, kids, these guys that cry and complain every flipping day have been doing it for a few years now, ask anyone of these guys: should a tac captain do good in a sci ship for damage? should a sci captain do good in an escort? should a cruiser be able to do good damage? should there be cloakers in 5v5 matches? BETTER yet, should an engineer captain be able to do good dps? all of these above they will say no, or give some "well, not as good as a tac captain in an escort" answer- fact is these guys want tons of ships in the game, but they also want their to be just 1 good ship for each class, 1 good build for each class, and that those builds CUT through everything else, tac in a scort, eng doing healing in a cruiser, sci worthless except for being an off healer in a sci ship- thats their dream for this game, thats what they want to go back to- they want noobs flying all the junk ships so that they have something to shoot at and ridicule nightly- and when cryptic started to drift away from that junk balance in the game, when these dino players started getting poped in the cues left and right- they spazzed out and most quit the game (can you blame them? its like your a knight, you fight in armor with a sword, and then I come along with a gun and shoot you, cause its not the dark ages anymore, its modern warfare, and the knight, all hes ever known is how to fight with the sword, he cant adapt, all he can do is complain, AGAIN I really dont fault them for it, we are all products of our own eras, but in the same stroke theirs the powers balance issue, and if anyone tells ya it was more balanced in the past, YA it was balanced for escorts, and escorts alone)
balancing this game for escorts alone was in the end what killed pvp for this game years ago, I know plenty of die hard pvpers that walked away that spent good money in this game getting ships, learning about powers, and in the end walked away cause they saw the only thing that mattered for damage in pvp was a bug ship, and that all the other powers were junk, and the only way to run a solid team is do off healers and healers for the bug ships, AND god save you if you dont have at least 2 sci captains in their somewhere cause then it doesnt even matter, you will never get a kill LOL
couple came back, asked me what changed, I would tell them, "well now you can go into a cruiser and do damage, OR now you can make a romulan and cloak" but by the time they stated fixing the sci powers (and they still havent fixed all of them, let alone anything damage wise out of eng) I havent seen these guys back sinse, and can you blame them? how many years can you expect players to wait around until you get your act together with a powers tweak/balance pass? LOL
anyways, the games going full steam t6 and not looking back, and the rate they are bug fixing it will be the rapture before everything is sorted out correctly- BUT to try and paint a rosie picture that old seasons prior were WAY better is delusional, it only ment that once you knew what you were doing you did alot of no dying nightly and pug stomping sprinkled with some high-end fights that illustrated how worthless half the powers in the game really are
what was so great about the past was that your friends still played, that you still had excitement for the game, that everything still felt a little bit new and rough
its the same in any other mmo, these things are not built to be played for decades LOL, their designed to grab your attention for a year, maybe 2 tops, anyone that stays in beyond that will ALWAYS turn slowly into a jaded, angry, gamer- cause you want those old feelings back and theres NOTHING on this earth that can make them come back, so at least you can vent all the time to feel better:)
The problem here is a snow balling effect that has taken place over the past years of this game. Pre-LoR every single day I used to wake up, Pandas would put together a 5 man and head for the queues, in hopes of finding another fleet doing the same. Back then, you could pop into one of three matches: 1) 100% pugs, 15-0 in 2 mins. 2) Recognizable names that weren't in a fleet but pugged pvp all day, or opvp pugmade. 3) Another fleet on voice comms that will give you a good match. This is when it was actually fun to pvp all day, in a premade. However, groups 3 and to somewhat the same effect group 2 drove group 1 out of the queues entirely. Not for the day. For good. The skill gap was so excessive even from group 1 to group 2 that pugs had no chance. This is a failing of the GAME not the players. This game is so forgiving while leveling. Nothing is taught to you. Diminishing returns in skill trees aren't known to 99.9% of the player base, pvpers included. The skill builds I've seen posted on these forums vary from decent to you need to go back to elementary school level math. Why, because the game fails to teach basic things about itself to new players or players who do not go out of their way to aquire this info.
When I came back from my break, the queues weren't anywhere near what they were. There were 2-3 hour blocks where you could actually catch pops relatively fast. Gone were the pugs from group 1, and now the queue is nothing but group 2 and 3. DR comes along and let me tell you about Pandas standard day. Put together 5 man, enter queues, 15-0 3-4 times in a row. IC finds out we're in the queue. 5v5 panda vs ic daily match. Everyone goes back to PvE and grinding after. This....wasn't fun....at all. Every day was the same as the last. You can blame premades "pugstomping" all you want...but at the end of the day, the pugstomping only occurs because of a failure to educate the player base on how to play the game besides: 1) have recluses to carry you 2) have faw 3) sit still engage macro. Then again, educating the playerbase in general would require the devs to actually learn to play their own game on the ACTUAL server, not in an isolated dev test server where all the spahgetti code hasn't yet ruined 90% of the game, in complete ignorance to any issues going on with holodeck, let alone pvp.
Back then, and I'm referring to pre season 6, while the escorts online mentality was heavily enforced the biggest problem was that other bridge officer skills underperforming in terms of ability to kill a player vs Canon rapid fire. Beam overloads older mechanics and pre buffed faw we're both laughable in PvP in terms of an actual 5v5 premade match. calling escorts online and the situations around it the players fault is just silly as we were doing nothing more than adapting to the most efficient kill pattern achievable in PvP.
in terms of calling something spam one thing that needs to be remembered is teams were not always separate cooldowns, all teams were tied to the same global cooldown. This created a situation where healers actually had to pay attention to the buffs in the debuffs on their team. With everything decoupled the attention span of a healer has been reduced by over 50%. The reason that we used to consider something like running five copies of scramble sensor 1 on a team spam is because it's impossible to defeat that level of spam and sci team necessity from only 3 healers. This is why most panda escorts ran sci team one on their bugs. Couple in with this viral matrix requiring an eng team which would put your sci team on cooldown you can see how a failure of mechanics on cryptic side snowballs into a situation where you can literally win a match the spam alone. Oh, and let's not forget during the time we're talking about there was no CC immunity granted by any form of CC. You could change scramble sensor someone's until you are blue in the face. We could also go down the old tippler and tricobalt combo for the ultimate skill kills. I guess what I'm trying to say is your mileage may vary and your opinion may greatly differ depending on where you view this games mechanics as faulty.
i havent really pvped since LoR dropped. my favourite style of pvp was the extended dogfight, but the rise of battlecloaking romulan vapers put an end to that. ever since the pvp has been less about dogfights and more about 'jousting', which is something that i cant really get excited about.
I agree - the skills of players in PvP are quite miles appart.
I mean, we (3-4 premade players) have trashed enemy teams with one player more 15:0 while others have trashed us badly. While the first one at least boosts your self confidence, neither of those situations is fun.
However, seeing that there are so few players PvPing, it's nonsense talking about matching up with equally good players. Currently I'm glad if we don't have to wait for 30 minutes before a game starts.
my suggestion:
1.) good rewards (ie: xp, Dil, items that one can only get in PvP, like PvP proc beams)
2.) rep system - group players of same Tier together (higher tiers, better rewards) - rep system maybe also with PvP related traits?
3.) PvP events - maybe even a league (create a team of 5 players, up to 2 subs, next 5 games count. Best 10 teams go on to play 5 games against each other. Top 3 ranks get rewards - spontaneous idea)
18 characters
KDF: 2 tacs, 2 engs, 3 scis
KDF Roms: 3 tacs, 1 eng, 1 scis
FED: 2 tacs, 1 eng, 2 scis
TOS: 1 tac
all on T5 rep (up to temporal)
all have mastered Intel tree (and some more specs Points)
highest DPS: 60.982
nuke/vap/uber heal is called balance. its called everything is important, everything has a valuable role, and there isn't something broken that bypasses essential checks and balances that made meaningful pvp possible.
thats why season 8 pvp was best. it had all that, but it was spread out and diluted a bit more, there was enough interesting and powerful things in the systems that i found matches just didn't go near as long. earlier seasons, the rose colored 'golden age', was a guaranty of hour matches if it nothing but fully skilled pvpers in play. roms definitely made pvp more interesting, wile actually preserving the triumvirate.
season 9 and crafting and out of control particle exploit damage was a nose dive for meaningful 3 ship type pvp, ESPECIALLY in pugs, particle ships MURDERED pug fun. and DR sucked any chance of meaningful, balanced pvp into a black hole. though thanks to some fixes by bort it might one day climb out. still, it will be stuck in its gravity well, i mean the epic cost and grind gates of entry, and even if the pvp is good again thats just to much, by like 3x at least, i cannot abide.
nuke/vap/uber heal is called balance. its called everything is important, everything has a valuable role, and there isn't something broken that bypasses essential checks and balances that made meaningful pvp possible.
thats why season 8 pvp was best. .
Minor correction: Crafting revamp came in season 9.5 just before DR.
Season 8.5 and season 9 was the golden age of PvP balance. You could make 1000 valid builds.
On that note i completely agree with @beammedown and @bwemo. right on the money.
Bwemo is completely right on the "game teaches you nothing" part. You need to check everything yourself. Your skill points distribution can go very wrong because its tooltip is so abstract it borders on being FALSE.
@beamedown is completely right as well. Who hasn't started throwing up from seeing 3wells+2bugs or Recluse/wells/bug fleet(pre)made pugstompers saying GG after 15:0 in OPvP and yet avoiding OPvP games or switching sides to be on "better side".
Even it's very unpopular i have said it then in people's faces and i will say it again: such pugstompmades were and will forever be remembered as biggest nubs this game has seen.
DR came and just flipped the table. Suddenly, skill(timing, situation exploit) needed to make a kill vs such premade or vs a player with 1bil EC more investment in his setup has gone down dramatically.
That's why most pugstompers left, first and foremost and then because of excessive grinding.
Of course no one can deny that game effectively broke with some stuff from t6 and delta reputation, it was like the time when doffed Sensor Scramble pug teams were everywhere and PvP was unbearable.
Yeah, PvP meta was for so long so simple, Lobi/lockbox wins and lobi/lockbox in team PWNS, except for very rare occasions.
All the way until LoR and then even more in s8, 8.5 and s9 where various nice synergy builds emerged and became effective and PvP was really exciting.
Broken abilities aside (we have always had them), its the grind that's holding up most people and that's why the queues have died to a merge extent.
I had 4 ALTs all who pvped pre DR and at a satisfactory level....now...I have one of those at lvl 60 with only a handful of mk14 gear and only one ship mastery! All our pre DR chars are gimps until we grind them, spend millions of dill and P2W to get to our pre DR level...
It used to be, buy a trait from latest lockbox and grind out rep in a few weeks to stay competitive. Now you have to live in the game and spend your rent on it!
This is the problem!
In time everyone will have the gear and traits and we may see as again but unless the grind is tempered it may be too little to late.
as a long time pugger (rip -w-a-s-t-e-s-i-d-e-) i gotta disagree on that s7-9 yays!... it was totally possible to own f.e. with a armitage before, not that much afterwards.
it's fine u dudes see it that way, but my goggles are another colour. and it's not that pugstomp color i talk about (been on both sides of the coin a lot more than once, just as many others of u)!
before lor it was most fun to me, with all the downsides there have been. one of the reason for that is f.e. that fleetgear not had been maxed out by all means by that time.
one could go with simple gear (mk xi blue cons, vr mk xi guns; i used crtdx3 for a long time and got good results) and a halfway decent build and get lots of gg's.
one could fight 3 fleeties from any fleet and not necessarily got owned, but make some nice surprises to them (like shooting the scort off the side of a decent healer recluse, or just ram that recluse into oblivion. booom jorge ;-D).
one could go with a kumari and a wells into a c&h full of pandas and collect one skin after the other.
even post-lor it was possible to scare a very known scimi-vaper those days on a fleet-armitage.
it's ok u guys see it your way and of course it not always has been the way i desribed above. but even with all the downsides, there have been the most of what i'd call balance mechanic-wise imo (not regarding matchmaking, there never have been such as we know).
bugs are a nice example. it was absolutely possible to take a bug out on a good-built defiant. it absolutely was more about the pilot than the ship!
but that's me and i guess we all got our personal experiences, but plz dudes: don't call others opinions as "pugstomper/whatever" mentality and render them as wimps, u guys should know better imo.
i know there've been a lot around of those, but there always has been the nice guys as well. and those not were too less!....
s5 server ftw. i learned to pvp by then. i got my TRIBBLE handed over so many times i can't count. but it not took too long to become competitive and i never had more fun than those days when i finally knew halfway what i was doing, and more important: what others did do.
now to know what others are doing just makes me sick and i absolutely not feel to stay on par with so many things that are rendered unfair with my goggles .
i always avoided to use stuff that affects others gameplay those days. i tried to only use stuff that affect me, not others. with ongoing game-progression (lol) that became harder and harder and these days u have to use stuff that affects others gameplay, just to have a chance for the kill.
u can have it if that is fun to you. i'll keep on tryin to just say no .
/whateverthatwas: off
edit: i mostly play bf4 these days and am not really good (been a while since i played shooters the last time lol). but it's so much more fun than a single match in here nowadays, even if i get my TRIBBLE handed over much more often lol... why? because it's at least a bit more fairness involved over there! get a gun, shoot the guy and die or let die lol . may gonna dip into ed when i feel to buy it...
edit2:
many of those old players left more likely cause cryptic did nothing about pvp but to add a lot of op stuff (remember mirror cheese anyone? pandas in disguise to proove to everyone how broken all that sh** was at around s8/9?! no fun or much chance to really fight em, but i appreciated!)....
@wast33
You are right as well. there were very much memorable moments inbetween broken stuff in s5,6 and all the way up to DR, it's just that s7-9 had more flavor, let's say.
I personally enjoyed completely unbalanced FvK as a Fed with 3fed AFKer on my team vs kling premade. When me in TBR/SS Mirror Recon and Zagor in Bug with 3 afk teamamtes won one such match vs kling carrier/guramba premade in FvK, that was my most memorable moment.
At one point i counted 72 pets surrounding our spawn. and yet we won. Shame i didn't record videos back then.
I personally always tried to fly a SCI with a bite(read: shield disable+BO/HY) or tac with some sci abilities, before Aventine, and especially before Dyson i couldn't do that on tac.
And on romulan of course i will try to kill as fast and as many as i can. You just don't play romulan warbirds any other way when you can do that.
On pugstomping, I have joined various teams/fleets on TS and gone in arena. Stomping PUGs in less time then good PvE team can finish ISE is nothing to write home about.
@wast33
You are right as well. there were very much memorable moments inbetween broken stuff in s5,6 and all the way up to DR, it's just that s7-9 had more flavor, let's say.
I personally enjoyed completely unbalanced FvK as a Fed with 3fed AFKer on my team vs kling premade. When me in TBR/SS Mirror Recon and Zagor in Bug with 3 afk teamamtes won one such match vs kling carrier/guramba premade in FvK, that was my most memorable moment.
At one point i counted 72 pets surrounding our spawn. and yet we won. Shame i didn't record videos back then.
I personally always tried to fly a SCI with a bite(read: shield disable+BO/HY) or tac with some sci abilities, before Aventine, and especially before Dyson i couldn't do that on tac.
And on romulan of course i will try to kill as fast and as many as i can. You just don't play romulan warbirds any other way when you can do that.
On pugstomping, I have joined various teams/fleets on TS and gone in arena. Stomping PUGs in less time then good PvE team can finish ISE is nothing to write home about.
i dont for one second believe that any kdf team you and one other guy beat was a premade of any kind. particularly not if 72 pets were swarming your spawn...
i dont for one second believe that any kdf team you and one other guy beat was a premade of any kind. particularly not if 72 pets were swarming your spawn...
its a shame you didnt record videos.
ah, you don't believe me. well, that is fair. I have no evidence.
Broken abilities aside (we have always had them), its the grind that's holding up most people and that's why the queues have died to a merge extent.
I had 4 ALTs all who pvped pre DR and at a satisfactory level....now...I have one of those at lvl 60 with only a handful of mk14 gear and only one ship mastery! All our pre DR chars are gimps until we grind them, spend millions of dill and P2W to get to our pre DR level...
It used to be, buy a trait from latest lockbox and grind out rep in a few weeks to stay competitive. Now you have to live in the game and spend your rent on it!
This is the problem!
In time everyone will have the gear and traits and we may see as again but unless the grind is tempered it may be too little to late.
That about sums it up.
This game has been 5 years of horrible releases for PvP balance.
We have mostly adapted to all of them... loosing a few players along the way... and picking up a few new ones. I would say its been a net trickle of players out of the game, as new players have never came in fast enough to replace those that leave every major patch.
However right now yes adapting is just not going to happen. There is far to much grind involved.
When DR hit a few pandas did grind like mad to try and get a toon ready. A few did *cough* *Lorrie* then Cryptic nerfed XP gain with a sledge hammer and the idea of putting on a diaper for a week and catching up went out the window. The joke is on Cryptic really... as I know another 4-5 pandas would have likely plunked down Hundreds of dollars to catch up if they could sit there for a weekend or two and turn that into caught up toons. With the game setup the way it is now where you have to drop the money AND the time... the game will remain a dead. We have always had the "balance sucks" argument to leave after every patch. What kept us coming back was "X Y and Z are still playing... alright I have fun with them I'll catch up"
I think we have now hit a critical mass. A point where enough of ALL our friends are gone that we can't justify bothering to catch up anymore.
It was confirmed to us on countless occasions back in '11 by the devs that this game is strictly PvE. That's when most of the original PvP community left. The gimmicks have gone from bad to worse.
There are two things about PvP one must learn - It is no longer based on skill and be like the Devs (don't take it seriously).
Yeah...the time required to grind is become insane!
I don't understand Cryptic...there are so many awesome games out there and sure they know the Star Trek fans love playing also these games...I mean space ones like Elite Dangerous just released and Star Citizen already playable at the initial stage of its development.
But a serious gamer plays for example Dragon Age Inquisition and Alien Isolation...fascinating games would say our pointed ears friend...
Why don't Devs give a chance to those who want to spend money to remain PvP competitive?
First of, you don't need to grind or to spend too much to remain competitive, that is purely subjective decision to do so. I never had uber gear so I am used to play it this way, anyway.
I stopped grinding after first week, and only do 2-3 grind missions if i want a trait from a new ship. My specs are at like 30% on romulan and 10% on fed. Not like they do much difference except flanking and intel fleet and some pilot stuff if you REALLY need it.
Making stuff EPIC is just a colossal waste of money for some and needed for others to have the absolute Best.
But having best gear full specs and OP traits and every rep trait is tricky. You cannot blame it then on nobody else when you fail. Well, except maybe on cryptic lol.
First of, you don't need to grind or to spend too much to remain competitive, that is purely subjective decision to do so. I never had uber gear so I am used to play it this way, anyway.
I stopped grinding after first week, and only do 2-3 grind missions if i want a trait from a new ship. My specs are at like 30% on romulan and 10% on fed. Not like they do much difference except flanking and intel fleet and some pilot stuff if you REALLY need it.
Making stuff EPIC is just a colossal waste of money for some and needed for others to have the absolute Best.
But having best gear full specs and OP traits and every rep trait is tricky. You cannot blame it then on nobody else when you fail. Well, except maybe on cryptic lol.
Agreed there.
On my Fed, I have like 10 spec points spent in Intel tree, half Pilot unlocked, nothing in Command. There's really no big point in grinding to death everything in the game, so I just didn't bother.
Epic quality isn't something you should aim for, the price/outcome is awfully bad, the Mk number is what matters in the end.
As far as it goes for starship traits, only today I could slot 4/4 on my Fed tac. The first trait came from the Pathfinder, then the Phantom, Samsar and Presidio today. No grinding, I stopped doing that long time ago.
Basically now I still play PvP when it happens, hang out with friends, chat, do Foundry missions, all that seems entertaining. Maybe a new ship sometimes to try something new. I have to say, the Command Battlecruisers are really, really nice. I don't feel them overpowered. Their abilities would have some nice PvP implications, sad thing is that hardly ever we get to do a match.
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lol, interesting guess. but don't forget about full-size fleet support and pirates f.e.. cryptics meta-policy is so... cryptic in many ways ;-(.
edit: even more interesting with the upcoming shuttle weekend lol.
Improved Command Frequency and dropping that out every 5 minutes.
The problem here is a snow balling effect that has taken place over the past years of this game. Pre-LoR every single day I used to wake up, Pandas would put together a 5 man and head for the queues, in hopes of finding another fleet doing the same. Back then, you could pop into one of three matches: 1) 100% pugs, 15-0 in 2 mins. 2) Recognizable names that weren't in a fleet but pugged pvp all day, or opvp pugmade. 3) Another fleet on voice comms that will give you a good match. This is when it was actually fun to pvp all day, in a premade. However, groups 3 and to somewhat the same effect group 2 drove group 1 out of the queues entirely. Not for the day. For good. The skill gap was so excessive even from group 1 to group 2 that pugs had no chance. This is a failing of the GAME not the players. This game is so forgiving while leveling. Nothing is taught to you. Diminishing returns in skill trees aren't known to 99.9% of the player base, pvpers included. The skill builds I've seen posted on these forums vary from decent to you need to go back to elementary school level math. Why, because the game fails to teach basic things about itself to new players or players who do not go out of their way to aquire this info.
When I came back from my break, the queues weren't anywhere near what they were. There were 2-3 hour blocks where you could actually catch pops relatively fast. Gone were the pugs from group 1, and now the queue is nothing but group 2 and 3. DR comes along and let me tell you about Pandas standard day. Put together 5 man, enter queues, 15-0 3-4 times in a row. IC finds out we're in the queue. 5v5 panda vs ic daily match. Everyone goes back to PvE and grinding after. This....wasn't fun....at all. Every day was the same as the last. You can blame premades "pugstomping" all you want...but at the end of the day, the pugstomping only occurs because of a failure to educate the player base on how to play the game besides: 1) have recluses to carry you 2) have faw 3) sit still engage macro. Then again, educating the playerbase in general would require the devs to actually learn to play their own game on the ACTUAL server, not in an isolated dev test server where all the spahgetti code hasn't yet ruined 90% of the game, in complete ignorance to any issues going on with holodeck, let alone pvp.
lol.... just as lol as i seemed to forget about that they altered the big-ship issue (got reminded on over in that thread).
not sure about uni-cons though. and i don't think i'm about to find out myself
so much this! and it became worse, at least regarding op-toys and abilities in the hands of players that are half-way knowing what they're doing. it's a designed to cater the casuals.
Oh, I was just thinking about the Command Officer trait - I didn't even consider whether any additional CD reduction was possible on Fleet Support...hrmm, is 5 minutes the min CD on that or can it actually go lower? Work in some Reciprocity and All Hands on Deck with some 3pc Contractual.
To an extent though, wouldn't a "goal" when dealing with an "extremely casual non-gamer player" be to create that sense of fun...which could be created through toy saturation to get folks to a certain level (which also in turn would result in folks doing ludicrous things in the DPS Channels and PvP)...?
If two smart pilots are head to head, they could technically trade rock n roll for rock n roll all afternoon. (In a 1 on 1 scenario).
no idea mate. i do think it's even 10 mins, but with 5 on teams cycling it.... don't ask me about those command-stuff. i read it through once and thought like: yay, now it's surely dead jim
i think they would've screwed the gameplay way less up if they'd just would have created some decent tutorials on skill-building, game-mechanics and synergies.
i'd really liked to see a synergies chart for everyone f.e., that makes it possible to see any change on build with one look
when i think off a good tutorial in which a dev leads the player to where he wants him to be referring on ingame knowledge, i somehow always think off the first operation flashpoint (cold war crisis).
This is right on the money.
+1000000 zen
Another good read.
in terms of calling something spam one thing that needs to be remembered is teams were not always separate cooldowns, all teams were tied to the same global cooldown. This created a situation where healers actually had to pay attention to the buffs in the debuffs on their team. With everything decoupled the attention span of a healer has been reduced by over 50%. The reason that we used to consider something like running five copies of scramble sensor 1 on a team spam is because it's impossible to defeat that level of spam and sci team necessity from only 3 healers. This is why most panda escorts ran sci team one on their bugs. Couple in with this viral matrix requiring an eng team which would put your sci team on cooldown you can see how a failure of mechanics on cryptic side snowballs into a situation where you can literally win a match the spam alone. Oh, and let's not forget during the time we're talking about there was no CC immunity granted by any form of CC. You could change scramble sensor someone's until you are blue in the face. We could also go down the old tippler and tricobalt combo for the ultimate skill kills. I guess what I'm trying to say is your mileage may vary and your opinion may greatly differ depending on where you view this games mechanics as faulty.
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I mean, we (3-4 premade players) have trashed enemy teams with one player more 15:0 while others have trashed us badly. While the first one at least boosts your self confidence, neither of those situations is fun.
However, seeing that there are so few players PvPing, it's nonsense talking about matching up with equally good players. Currently I'm glad if we don't have to wait for 30 minutes before a game starts.
my suggestion:
1.) good rewards (ie: xp, Dil, items that one can only get in PvP, like PvP proc beams)
2.) rep system - group players of same Tier together (higher tiers, better rewards) - rep system maybe also with PvP related traits?
3.) PvP events - maybe even a league (create a team of 5 players, up to 2 subs, next 5 games count. Best 10 teams go on to play 5 games against each other. Top 3 ranks get rewards - spontaneous idea)
KDF: 2 tacs, 2 engs, 3 scis
KDF Roms: 3 tacs, 1 eng, 1 scis
FED: 2 tacs, 1 eng, 2 scis
TOS: 1 tac
all on T5 rep (up to temporal)
all have mastered Intel tree (and some more specs Points)
highest DPS: 60.982
thats why season 8 pvp was best. it had all that, but it was spread out and diluted a bit more, there was enough interesting and powerful things in the systems that i found matches just didn't go near as long. earlier seasons, the rose colored 'golden age', was a guaranty of hour matches if it nothing but fully skilled pvpers in play. roms definitely made pvp more interesting, wile actually preserving the triumvirate.
season 9 and crafting and out of control particle exploit damage was a nose dive for meaningful 3 ship type pvp, ESPECIALLY in pugs, particle ships MURDERED pug fun. and DR sucked any chance of meaningful, balanced pvp into a black hole. though thanks to some fixes by bort it might one day climb out. still, it will be stuck in its gravity well, i mean the epic cost and grind gates of entry, and even if the pvp is good again thats just to much, by like 3x at least, i cannot abide.
Minor correction: Crafting revamp came in season 9.5 just before DR.
Season 8.5 and season 9 was the golden age of PvP balance. You could make 1000 valid builds.
On that note i completely agree with @beammedown and @bwemo. right on the money.
Bwemo is completely right on the "game teaches you nothing" part. You need to check everything yourself. Your skill points distribution can go very wrong because its tooltip is so abstract it borders on being FALSE.
@beamedown is completely right as well. Who hasn't started throwing up from seeing 3wells+2bugs or Recluse/wells/bug fleet(pre)made pugstompers saying GG after 15:0 in OPvP and yet avoiding OPvP games or switching sides to be on "better side".
Even it's very unpopular i have said it then in people's faces and i will say it again: such pugstompmades were and will forever be remembered as biggest nubs this game has seen.
DR came and just flipped the table. Suddenly, skill(timing, situation exploit) needed to make a kill vs such premade or vs a player with 1bil EC more investment in his setup has gone down dramatically.
That's why most pugstompers left, first and foremost and then because of excessive grinding.
Of course no one can deny that game effectively broke with some stuff from t6 and delta reputation, it was like the time when doffed Sensor Scramble pug teams were everywhere and PvP was unbearable.
Yeah, PvP meta was for so long so simple, Lobi/lockbox wins and lobi/lockbox in team PWNS, except for very rare occasions.
All the way until LoR and then even more in s8, 8.5 and s9 where various nice synergy builds emerged and became effective and PvP was really exciting.
It was so much Win
so much Epic
and so much Fun
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I had 4 ALTs all who pvped pre DR and at a satisfactory level....now...I have one of those at lvl 60 with only a handful of mk14 gear and only one ship mastery! All our pre DR chars are gimps until we grind them, spend millions of dill and P2W to get to our pre DR level...
It used to be, buy a trait from latest lockbox and grind out rep in a few weeks to stay competitive. Now you have to live in the game and spend your rent on it!
This is the problem!
In time everyone will have the gear and traits and we may see as again but unless the grind is tempered it may be too little to late.
it's fine u dudes see it that way, but my goggles are another colour. and it's not that pugstomp color i talk about (been on both sides of the coin a lot more than once, just as many others of u)!
before lor it was most fun to me, with all the downsides there have been. one of the reason for that is f.e. that fleetgear not had been maxed out by all means by that time.
one could go with simple gear (mk xi blue cons, vr mk xi guns; i used crtdx3 for a long time and got good results) and a halfway decent build and get lots of gg's.
one could fight 3 fleeties from any fleet and not necessarily got owned, but make some nice surprises to them (like shooting the scort off the side of a decent healer recluse, or just ram that recluse into oblivion. booom jorge ;-D).
one could go with a kumari and a wells into a c&h full of pandas and collect one skin after the other.
even post-lor it was possible to scare a very known scimi-vaper those days on a fleet-armitage.
it's ok u guys see it your way and of course it not always has been the way i desribed above. but even with all the downsides, there have been the most of what i'd call balance mechanic-wise imo (not regarding matchmaking, there never have been such as we know).
bugs are a nice example. it was absolutely possible to take a bug out on a good-built defiant. it absolutely was more about the pilot than the ship!
but that's me and i guess we all got our personal experiences, but plz dudes: don't call others opinions as "pugstomper/whatever" mentality and render them as wimps, u guys should know better imo.
i know there've been a lot around of those, but there always has been the nice guys as well. and those not were too less!....
s5 server ftw. i learned to pvp by then. i got my TRIBBLE handed over so many times i can't count. but it not took too long to become competitive and i never had more fun than those days when i finally knew halfway what i was doing, and more important: what others did do.
now to know what others are doing just makes me sick and i absolutely not feel to stay on par with so many things that are rendered unfair with my goggles
i always avoided to use stuff that affects others gameplay those days. i tried to only use stuff that affect me, not others. with ongoing game-progression (lol) that became harder and harder and these days u have to use stuff that affects others gameplay, just to have a chance for the kill.
u can have it if that is fun to you. i'll keep on tryin to just say no
/whateverthatwas: off
edit: i mostly play bf4 these days and am not really good (been a while since i played shooters the last time lol). but it's so much more fun than a single match in here nowadays, even if i get my TRIBBLE handed over much more often lol... why? because it's at least a bit more fairness involved over there! get a gun, shoot the guy and die or let die lol
edit2:
many of those old players left more likely cause cryptic did nothing about pvp but to add a lot of op stuff (remember mirror cheese anyone? pandas in disguise to proove to everyone how broken all that sh** was at around s8/9?! no fun or much chance to really fight em, but i appreciated!)....
You are right as well. there were very much memorable moments inbetween broken stuff in s5,6 and all the way up to DR, it's just that s7-9 had more flavor, let's say.
I personally enjoyed completely unbalanced FvK as a Fed with 3fed AFKer on my team vs kling premade. When me in TBR/SS Mirror Recon and Zagor in Bug with 3 afk teamamtes won one such match vs kling carrier/guramba premade in FvK, that was my most memorable moment.
At one point i counted 72 pets surrounding our spawn. and yet we won. Shame i didn't record videos back then.
I personally always tried to fly a SCI with a bite(read: shield disable+BO/HY) or tac with some sci abilities, before Aventine, and especially before Dyson i couldn't do that on tac.
And on romulan of course i will try to kill as fast and as many as i can. You just don't play romulan warbirds any other way when you can do that.
On pugstomping, I have joined various teams/fleets on TS and gone in arena. Stomping PUGs in less time then good PvE team can finish ISE is nothing to write home about.
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:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
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please elaborate.
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i dont for one second believe that any kdf team you and one other guy beat was a premade of any kind. particularly not if 72 pets were swarming your spawn...
its a shame you didnt record videos.
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ah, you don't believe me. well, that is fair. I have no evidence.
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That about sums it up.
This game has been 5 years of horrible releases for PvP balance.
We have mostly adapted to all of them... loosing a few players along the way... and picking up a few new ones. I would say its been a net trickle of players out of the game, as new players have never came in fast enough to replace those that leave every major patch.
However right now yes adapting is just not going to happen. There is far to much grind involved.
When DR hit a few pandas did grind like mad to try and get a toon ready. A few did *cough* *Lorrie* then Cryptic nerfed XP gain with a sledge hammer and the idea of putting on a diaper for a week and catching up went out the window. The joke is on Cryptic really... as I know another 4-5 pandas would have likely plunked down Hundreds of dollars to catch up if they could sit there for a weekend or two and turn that into caught up toons. With the game setup the way it is now where you have to drop the money AND the time... the game will remain a dead. We have always had the "balance sucks" argument to leave after every patch. What kept us coming back was "X Y and Z are still playing... alright I have fun with them I'll catch up"
I think we have now hit a critical mass. A point where enough of ALL our friends are gone that we can't justify bothering to catch up anymore.
http://stokt.aforumfree.com/t2275-hall-of-fame
It was confirmed to us on countless occasions back in '11 by the devs that this game is strictly PvE. That's when most of the original PvP community left. The gimmicks have gone from bad to worse.
There are two things about PvP one must learn - It is no longer based on skill and be like the Devs (don't take it seriously).
http://stokt.aforumfree.com/t2275-hall-of-fame
First of, you don't need to grind or to spend too much to remain competitive, that is purely subjective decision to do so. I never had uber gear so I am used to play it this way, anyway.
I stopped grinding after first week, and only do 2-3 grind missions if i want a trait from a new ship. My specs are at like 30% on romulan and 10% on fed. Not like they do much difference except flanking and intel fleet and some pilot stuff if you REALLY need it.
Making stuff EPIC is just a colossal waste of money for some and needed for others to have the absolute Best.
But having best gear full specs and OP traits and every rep trait is tricky. You cannot blame it then on nobody else when you fail. Well, except maybe on cryptic lol.
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Agreed there.
On my Fed, I have like 10 spec points spent in Intel tree, half Pilot unlocked, nothing in Command. There's really no big point in grinding to death everything in the game, so I just didn't bother.
Epic quality isn't something you should aim for, the price/outcome is awfully bad, the Mk number is what matters in the end.
As far as it goes for starship traits, only today I could slot 4/4 on my Fed tac. The first trait came from the Pathfinder, then the Phantom, Samsar and Presidio today. No grinding, I stopped doing that long time ago.
Basically now I still play PvP when it happens, hang out with friends, chat, do Foundry missions, all that seems entertaining. Maybe a new ship sometimes to try something new. I have to say, the Command Battlecruisers are really, really nice. I don't feel them overpowered. Their abilities would have some nice PvP implications, sad thing is that hardly ever we get to do a match.
Im sorry, but for my part PvP died with the release of delta rising (sadly).
Greetz Siegfried