Which weren't there until recently and seemed pretty much demanded by the elite DPSers becuase shock of shocks aggressive mini maxing in a game where the only tool to do so is third party software and not any in game mechanic so the devs likely weren't designing things around this BECAUSE ITS 3RD PARTY SOFTWARE can lead to effortlessly killing things and which can get boring to the challenge seekers.
Seriously the old level cap was designed around level 40 ships with common mk X gear. What did they think DPS parsing to increase DPS was going to do?
Max DPSing is fine when it's a hobby, but a pain when it's mandatory.
The combatlog is something that was in the game since the beginning. Its not 3rd party. Parsers are 3rd party, but they dont interact with the game.
The new advanced is balanced around lv50 chars with free lv40 ships with mk xi blue gear. No joke, more than enough to do the required dps (which btw. was always there for optionals).
But I understand you, it is of course very shameful when others can see that you leech of them
The combatlog is something that was in the game since the beginning. Its not 3rd party. Parsers are 3rd party, but they dont interact with the game.
The new advanced is balanced around lv50 chars with free lv40 ships with mk xi blue gear. No joke, more than enough to do the required dps (which btw. was always there for optionals).
There is no set DPS requirement. Players can play however they want to play. If people want to run an STF with their own DPS requirement I'm sure they will find willing participants in the various DPS channels.
If people just want to pug, there is no DPS requirement at all.
What's incredible to me is that of the great many MMO's I've played, STO has by far the strangest community. In no other game have I ever seen players complain about the "top" players being too good. Maybe a class needing an ability altered, or something of that nature.. but not an entire group of people based on skill level. Additionally, the "competency level" of the population in STO is frighteningly low. In most games there are a few players that are flat out bad (such as the WoW rogue in my earlier analogy). There is also a relatively equal number on the high end of the scale. Most players though sit on a sort of bell curve putting them right about at an average level. In STO, that curve is skewed extremely heavily to the left, with even "average" players being in the extreme minority. This isn't caused by outliers pushing the limits ever higher, but rather by the fact that most players simply don't comprehend the game mechanics. "Average" in STO should sit around 20-30k dps for any player that's not a freshly leveled character. For those, 10k is easily achievable. Players sitting in the 20-30k range aren't exploiting any broken mechanics, aren't using gear that's unachievable to the most casual of players, and aren't superbly skilled. They're just average players using an average setup, that's often less than totally ideal.
What's more strange than the scarcity of even average players is the community's overall mindset on the topic. The idea that players who are for all intents and purposes average are the problem while those who should be in the bottom 5% of population instead make up the vast majority is a perfectly okay situation.. it's just mind boggling. This just isn't a situation that arises in most MMO's.
The combatlog is something that was in the game since the beginning. Its not 3rd party. Parsers are 3rd party, but they dont interact with the game.
The new advanced is balanced around lv50 chars with free lv40 ships with mk xi blue gear. No joke, more than enough to do the required dps (which btw. was always there for optionals).
But I understand you, it is of course very shameful when others can see that you leech of them
It doesn't take combat logs to design a decent setup. It takes simply considering abilities and properly deciding what is useful and what isn't. I was flying well geared and properly set up ships long before I learned how to use a parser. The parser is merely a tool to help show you what the game does a horrible job of showing. What does what exactly. STO's tooltips and the like are incredibly useless. Most pretty much amount to "this does something, sometimes, for some amount, and after it's used it'll be unusable for some amount of time." They're about that specific.. very few give you any real idea of what they do, how often, how much, or when.
Failing is not necessarily attributed to lack of DPS. Lack of teamwork/communication and not knowing how the mission works are perhaps more responsible for mission failures.
I can only comment on my own experience, but failures on account of someone trying to chew through too fast and getting swamped with spawns make up most of mine - whereas simply running the time out due to lack of DPS I can count on one hand.
DPS can easily be just as much a hindrance to a team as low DPS in the right circumstances. Perhaps instead of calling them out and telling them to get better, perhaps you could be more patient and allow everyone to contribute in the first place?
There is no set DPS requirement. Players can play however they want to play. If people want to run an STF with their own DPS requirement I'm sure they will find willing participants in the various DPS channels.
If people just want to pug, there is no DPS requirement at all.
There is a DPS requirement, though.
You need a minimum amount of DPS to prevent the Probes/Spheres from getting to the Gateway in Khitomer Accords.
You need a minimum amount of DPS to take down the Transformer before the Nanite Spheres get to it in Infected Space.
You need a minimum amount of DPS to take out the incoming Borgified Klingon ships in The Cure Found.
Pugging or not, you need to do a minimum amount of damage in order to make sure you don't fail. And that minimum amount has increased in DR. What we need is for 'baseline' damage to be increased so even failpugs are meaningfully contributing and for the absurdly high HP amounts to come down.
What's more strange than the scarcity of even average players is the community's overall mindset on the topic. The idea that players who are for all intents and purposes average are the problem while those who should be in the bottom 5% of population instead make up the vast majority is a perfectly okay situation.. it's just mind boggling. This just isn't a situation that arises in most MMO's.
Probably becuase in other games the good gear isn't behind a somewhat pay wall.
And they probably don't have a fanbase of a franchise that probably mostly doesn't care about DPS and PVP since Star Trek is kind of light on the combat focus as the ones most likely to try it.
If you're under 10k in a T5 or higher boat, something is seriously wrong. That can easily be achieved with nothing but greens, human boffs, and no expensive traits and the like.
With a useless FAW build, sure.
Also, your breakdown of average/good/excellent players completely ignores that so much of the differentiation between these categories is gear. I can't envision myself jumping through all the hoops necessary to upgrade even some of my gear to MK XIV epic, let alone most or all, nor am I interested in running a FAW/TS boat (and frankly hope they nerf that meta into the ground; it's worse than the cannon meta was).
"Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society." - Aristotle
Pugging or not, you need to do a minimum amount of damage in order to make sure you don't fail. And that minimum amount has increased in DR. What we need is for 'baseline' damage to be increased so even failpugs are meaningfully contributing and for the absurdly high HP amounts to come down.
The HP isn't absurdly high. The "average" player in STO just does absurdly low damage. For those who are where average should really be, advanced is mostly pretty easy while elite is still fairly challenging.
I did an ISA yesterday with a PvP sci drain boat where the only modification I did for ISA was change to 5 mkXI VR beams. It had no TAC consoles or FAW/BO/[Pla] consoles. My ship still pulled 8.5K which is way more than my usual 2.5K with the full drain setup. You don't need any of those fancy ridiculous space bar smashing setups with 20 buffs running to do well in PvE. Heck, if you use vr Mk II tac consoles and upgrade them, you'll do really well without having to grind horribly those spire consoles.
And in a very casual game what makes you think people hunt for and read TRIBBLE online just to figure out how to play it.
Exactly.
STO needs to decide whether it's a super casual game or a more hardcore one. Scaling difficulty against the highest percentage of the population does no favors to the low-end/casual crowd.
The HP isn't absurdly high. The "average" player in STO just does absurdly low damage. For those who are where average should really be, advanced is mostly pretty easy while elite is still fairly challenging.
NPCs with 500,000 HP isn't high?
It's not "challenging" when all they do is bump up HP. That's just the easy way out, for when people are going through things too fast and you need them to spend more time in game in order to pad the 'metrics.'
Making it challenging would be doing things like giving them actual damage resistance, more BOff abilities, or making them do things other than just fly in the same grouped pattern every time, just waiting for an AoE slaughterfest.
And in a very casual game what makes you think people hunt for and read TRIBBLE online just to figure out how to play it.
OMG you have to learn from other people to play at top levels? What kind of absurd team-based game is this?
It's surely not every online team-based game I've ever played.
Seriously. There's a wealth of information out there. If you want to play at normal levels, you can probably figure enough out to do fine. I'd hope. If you want to play at advanced or elite levels, you'll probably need outside help. That's not different from most online games that involve teamwork.
SCM - Crystal C. (S) - [00:12] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 8.63M(713.16K) - Fed Sci
STO needs to decide whether it's a super casual game or a more hardcore one.
Needs to decide? They already decided years ago. It's easier to convince your boss that you can sell power creep than it is to convince your boss you can sell costumes/environments.
"Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society." - Aristotle
Players also do.. well, let's just say a wee bit more damage than NPC's. This is extremely normal for MMO's, especially in group content. I don't think I've ever seen an MMO where the enemies had the same level of health as players in group content.
And no, buffing their HP doesn't inherently increase the difficulty.. unless the HP is part of the difficulty in that it's a dps race to take them out before something happens. For the most part though, the HP in normals is so extraordinary low my ship can literally break parts of the STF. In Cure Space for example, it's extremely easy to wipe out the cube without touching the things healing it.. even solo. Advanced is just about as easy.. in dps channel teams we generally send 2/1/2 out to the cubes, wipe them out in a matter of a handful of seconds, then turn around and eliminate all the enemy ships before positioning ourselves for the end fight. The entire run takes moments.. and that's just with 20-30k players that should be middle of the road, for those higher.. it's that much easier.
It was an extremely casual game that got new marching orders - make more money!
The feeling seems to be that the 1% whales are worth more than seas of casuals. Hence the current direction.
But for how long? How many waves of upgrades can you get a tiny group of gamers to continue to buy?
I would like to see the game continue for years. I would like for the 1% to want this also and to wonder if they can continue the pace of buying they have these past 4 months. But what I expect is "Game faceroll!! Me roll face on keyboard! LOL. Make timer 5 seconds NOOB!"
I feel only a glimmer of hope still for the game's survival. Which, as I've said many times, will be determined this March/April. How many queues will be zeroed out then? How low will the logins go? Will the reaction be increased difficulty along with T6 Flagships and borg collective lockbox - or will it be removal of failtimers? These are the sorts of questions for which we will soon have answers.
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."
You need a minimum amount of DPS to prevent the Probes/Spheres from getting to the Gateway in Khitomer Accords.
You need a minimum amount of DPS to take down the Transformer before the Nanite Spheres get to it in Infected Space.
You need a minimum amount of DPS to take out the incoming Borgified Klingon ships in The Cure Found.
No. If you can't bring the DPS, you can bring Gravity Wells and Tractor Beam Repulsors.
I think that was a bit what the original design of the mission tried to achieve.
Infected for example:
First you needed to know the right strategy - focus on one side and bring the generators down to 5 % before destroying anyone. Then destroy the transformer. If you don't have the DPS to do it fast enough (and I think it was not assumed that you had that DPS), use crowd control techniques to stop the nanite spheres from getting to the transformer.
Ultimately, STO's problem is that the difference between a bad build and a good build is ridiculously high. There is no way to design content difficulty around such a divergence. Either you have cake-walks on the high end or impossible missions on the low-end.
The reason we now have these giant hit points bags in Advanced and Elite is because Cryptic tried to reduce the cake-walks on the high-end - if the DPS is enough to melt an enemy in 10 seconds, he can have any amount of firepower and any amount of tricks, he won't have time to use them. But if you need 60 seconds for the same enemy, tricks and firepower could mean it impossible to beat him.
Of course, at least on the forums I get the impression that there is a sizeable minority of players that really don't care about balance. Sure, they might cry if something is underpowered, but something being too strong? Any fix is immediately called a nerf and Cryptic ruining their fun. But all these overpowered things they don't want fixed and all the underpowered things they just ignore lead to the vast power disparity in the game. And that is in the end ruining everyone's fun when they are railroaded into must-have powers to partake in advanced or elite content or ridiculed because they refuse or are not even aware to follow the power.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I just did an ISA that took about 10 minutes and I did over twice the damage of the other 4 people combined. I'm not even some "super elite dpser" but if they'd managed to "avoid me" and got someone comparable to their average, they would have just plain straight up failed.
Is that really what they want? To just repeatedly fail queues for... reasons? It's really really really NOT hard to learn how to equip your ship/play well. Just putting on whatever you randomly find and fits in an equipment slot... or do people even do that? Do they just run with a ship's default white equipment? Do they know about firing arcs? Do they have bridge officers slotted even? I'm struggling to find reasons for such low damage.
I think it's significantly more reasonable to ask that people put even the most minimal amount of effort in being better players than to ask to avoid people that manage to do damage. Doing damage isn't some hardcore super manic number crunching magic, it's just basic competence @_@
OMG you have to learn from other people to play at top levels? What kind of absurd team-based game is this?
It's surely not every online team-based game I've ever played.
Welcome to Star Trek where its mostly one ship and crew on their own and most encounters with other Starfleet ships are as antagonists, discovering why they all died, or guys in need of saving, or various combination of that.
So having the be one player = one ship kind makes the team-based game questionable.
the DPS community MOSTLY plays witth: the DPS community
The death of the PUG channels, the collapse of the most popular private channels...
All relegated to a few select groups that test by ISA.
That, now, is the end game.
How many successful MMOs survive long term by balkanizing their customers? The last and first one I recall was Asheron's Call and AC2. UO came close, course corrected impressively, then forgot that graphics actually matter.The others are, at best, on life control from a devoted hard core people with wallets who believe that <idea> cannot fail, only that <idea> will be failed by not enough Green Lantern / Tinkerbell believers.
EQ2 anyone?
STO is slipping into Green Lantern / Tinkerbell believer mode. Clap your hands harder.
I learned back with UO/EQ1 to not fight the trend. Koster and I had some very heated very public discussions on this. When a company decides to give up a cash cow and only pursue the ephemeral 10%... I go into the increasingly rarer "private pug" groups, learn that trolls have taken them over, and yet feel no great pressure to play the dps build of the week. So I play less.
FWIW I did my my last round of Zen. I'm simply playing the market now, anticipating the grownups in Cryptic to finally catch up and realise that it doesn't matter how many one-person fleets are out there (stop the FM hate), how many folks who drop hundreds but don't play hard (stop **** blocking T6 content with unfun HP sponges).
I have no content to play anymore. The T6 content is clearly about joining the private DPS clubs or a fleet. But that is the content I am expected to play. I'm not asking for a leg up, just content that sizes me up and gives me a balanced challenge. Four hours for a single episode is an indication to your customers we are not using our time wisely, the time we are paying you for...
I'm not buying this service to lend meaning to my life. I'm here to zone, burn off some stress like human being who like other human beings do, and I'm not interested in being someone who only has time to tune my leisure to some one else's OCD.
I've been playing the **** out of my g-d games like Civ5 and CIV:AC. So I've taken the cue, I play the dili market and make more with less effort, and I'm intrigued as I play more into Elite:Dangerous. I'd go back to EvE but I cannot tolerate the profound criminal hypocrisy of a company that uses Russian gangster money to support itself and destabilize true organic sector politics.
Anyway. I sure hope the pain is paying off Cryptic. Because it sure feels like STO is supposed to be another short term "no one knows what it is so burn it out" franchise.
Were I'd CBS I'd worry. But from day one everyone has expected ST to be that fad to go away, but except for Tolkien, Star Trek is the one franchise that will outlive everyone alive on this planet right now.
Shield Penetration Resistance: 95% w/ 5% Energy Absorption (Energy: 5% to Hull, 90% to Shield, 5% to power the servers; Kinetic: 5% to Hull, 95% to Shield)
Shield Damage Reduction: starts to taper off around 90%
Hull Damage Resistance: starts to taper off around 50-60%
Shield Healing: spammed
Hull Healing: spammed
So uh, the NPC ship is going to have more raw shields and hull than a player. IMHO, it's a design sacrifice that they made for the game to keep it casual. If NPCs had better shield damage reduction/hull damage resistance and had the ability to heal, how many players out there wouldn't be able to kill a thing, eh? Instead, you just go with those raw numbers...figure in an expected average DPS...and you can extrapolate a given amount of time for the combat engagement. Adjusting NPC health isn't about difficulty, it's about tweaking the time combat takes...
...cause when we hit up the other side of that coin, the dealing of damage - NPCs are such a non-threat...they've got low average base damage, they've got very low attacks per second, and it's only if somebody in a paper ship aggros the universe that there's any danger as that's all combined from multiple sources.
STO is a monster farm...it's like the King of the Hill episode, Good Hill Hunting. Even Bobby realizes that it's wrong. Folks in STO don't...they chest bump about it.
Fun fact: DPSers' ship do not have a single resist console equipped. Plus said ship sucks in PvP as it can only pwn NPCs, which are known for their extreme intelligence.
What I do most of the times is just challenge them to a PvP fight and bang, they're exploding soon after. OP, ignore them. DPSers are less threatening than a Baku. All I see are a bunch of guys who can only take down NPCs honestly faster than average.
I think this may be the first time I've had even partial agreement with you on anything, riccardo. I do not PVP at all and never will (other than to assist fleetmates in one-on-one build testing), but it really caught me off guard when there was so much upset over the Vaadwaur when they first came out, from people that I suspect had a good bit more DPS than I do. Yet my highly survivable crowd control build wasn't constantly getting popped (though I won't lie, it's not like I *never* exploded once in DR) and I found the Vaadwaur an interesting enemy to fight. But the thing is, running a CC build means you learn how to maneuver and endure, both of which the Vaadwaur demand for you to be successful against them. It was a real shock to discover such a bad reaction to the Vaadwaur--but I guess it goes to show that min/maxing *isn't* everything it's cracked up to be after all, even in PVE.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Comments
The combatlog is something that was in the game since the beginning. Its not 3rd party. Parsers are 3rd party, but they dont interact with the game.
The new advanced is balanced around lv50 chars with free lv40 ships with mk xi blue gear. No joke, more than enough to do the required dps (which btw. was always there for optionals).
But I understand you, it is of course very shameful when others can see that you leech of them
There is no set DPS requirement. Players can play however they want to play. If people want to run an STF with their own DPS requirement I'm sure they will find willing participants in the various DPS channels.
If people just want to pug, there is no DPS requirement at all.
Free Tibet!
What's more strange than the scarcity of even average players is the community's overall mindset on the topic. The idea that players who are for all intents and purposes average are the problem while those who should be in the bottom 5% of population instead make up the vast majority is a perfectly okay situation.. it's just mind boggling. This just isn't a situation that arises in most MMO's.
There is if you don't want to fail.
U.S.S. Buteo Regalis - Brigid Multi-Mission Surveillance Explorer build
R.R.W. Ri Maajon - Khopesh Tactical Dreadnought Warbird build
My Youtube channel containing STO videos.
It doesn't take combat logs to design a decent setup. It takes simply considering abilities and properly deciding what is useful and what isn't. I was flying well geared and properly set up ships long before I learned how to use a parser. The parser is merely a tool to help show you what the game does a horrible job of showing. What does what exactly. STO's tooltips and the like are incredibly useless. Most pretty much amount to "this does something, sometimes, for some amount, and after it's used it'll be unusable for some amount of time." They're about that specific.. very few give you any real idea of what they do, how often, how much, or when.
Failing is not necessarily attributed to lack of DPS. Lack of teamwork/communication and not knowing how the mission works are perhaps more responsible for mission failures.
I can only comment on my own experience, but failures on account of someone trying to chew through too fast and getting swamped with spawns make up most of mine - whereas simply running the time out due to lack of DPS I can count on one hand.
DPS can easily be just as much a hindrance to a team as low DPS in the right circumstances. Perhaps instead of calling them out and telling them to get better, perhaps you could be more patient and allow everyone to contribute in the first place?
There is a DPS requirement, though.
You need a minimum amount of DPS to prevent the Probes/Spheres from getting to the Gateway in Khitomer Accords.
You need a minimum amount of DPS to take down the Transformer before the Nanite Spheres get to it in Infected Space.
You need a minimum amount of DPS to take out the incoming Borgified Klingon ships in The Cure Found.
Pugging or not, you need to do a minimum amount of damage in order to make sure you don't fail. And that minimum amount has increased in DR. What we need is for 'baseline' damage to be increased so even failpugs are meaningfully contributing and for the absurdly high HP amounts to come down.
Probably becuase in other games the good gear isn't behind a somewhat pay wall.
And they probably don't have a fanbase of a franchise that probably mostly doesn't care about DPS and PVP since Star Trek is kind of light on the combat focus as the ones most likely to try it.
You can easily accomplish at least 10K in a free ship with Green Mk XI gear.
It's not just high level gear gives a lot of advantages, it's that a lot of people simply have no idea of how to build their ships.
You just validated his point. Congratz.
And in a very casual game what makes you think people hunt for and read TRIBBLE online just to figure out how to play it.
From what I understand, none of the public or semi-public channels are what they used to be.
With a useless FAW build, sure.
Also, your breakdown of average/good/excellent players completely ignores that so much of the differentiation between these categories is gear. I can't envision myself jumping through all the hoops necessary to upgrade even some of my gear to MK XIV epic, let alone most or all, nor am I interested in running a FAW/TS boat (and frankly hope they nerf that meta into the ground; it's worse than the cannon meta was).
The HP isn't absurdly high. The "average" player in STO just does absurdly low damage. For those who are where average should really be, advanced is mostly pretty easy while elite is still fairly challenging.
I did an ISA yesterday with a PvP sci drain boat where the only modification I did for ISA was change to 5 mkXI VR beams. It had no TAC consoles or FAW/BO/[Pla] consoles. My ship still pulled 8.5K which is way more than my usual 2.5K with the full drain setup. You don't need any of those fancy ridiculous space bar smashing setups with 20 buffs running to do well in PvE. Heck, if you use vr Mk II tac consoles and upgrade them, you'll do really well without having to grind horribly those spire consoles.
On elite a frigate has considerable more HP than a player cruiser.
So yeah it kind of is.
Exactly.
STO needs to decide whether it's a super casual game or a more hardcore one. Scaling difficulty against the highest percentage of the population does no favors to the low-end/casual crowd.
NPCs with 500,000 HP isn't high?
It's not "challenging" when all they do is bump up HP. That's just the easy way out, for when people are going through things too fast and you need them to spend more time in game in order to pad the 'metrics.'
Making it challenging would be doing things like giving them actual damage resistance, more BOff abilities, or making them do things other than just fly in the same grouped pattern every time, just waiting for an AoE slaughterfest.
OMG you have to learn from other people to play at top levels? What kind of absurd team-based game is this?
It's surely not every online team-based game I've ever played.
Seriously. There's a wealth of information out there. If you want to play at normal levels, you can probably figure enough out to do fine. I'd hope. If you want to play at advanced or elite levels, you'll probably need outside help. That's not different from most online games that involve teamwork.
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
Tacs are overrated.
Game's best wiki
Build questions? Look here!
And no, buffing their HP doesn't inherently increase the difficulty.. unless the HP is part of the difficulty in that it's a dps race to take them out before something happens. For the most part though, the HP in normals is so extraordinary low my ship can literally break parts of the STF. In Cure Space for example, it's extremely easy to wipe out the cube without touching the things healing it.. even solo. Advanced is just about as easy.. in dps channel teams we generally send 2/1/2 out to the cubes, wipe them out in a matter of a handful of seconds, then turn around and eliminate all the enemy ships before positioning ourselves for the end fight. The entire run takes moments.. and that's just with 20-30k players that should be middle of the road, for those higher.. it's that much easier.
The feeling seems to be that the 1% whales are worth more than seas of casuals. Hence the current direction.
But for how long? How many waves of upgrades can you get a tiny group of gamers to continue to buy?
I would like to see the game continue for years. I would like for the 1% to want this also and to wonder if they can continue the pace of buying they have these past 4 months. But what I expect is "Game faceroll!! Me roll face on keyboard! LOL. Make timer 5 seconds NOOB!"
I feel only a glimmer of hope still for the game's survival. Which, as I've said many times, will be determined this March/April. How many queues will be zeroed out then? How low will the logins go? Will the reaction be increased difficulty along with T6 Flagships and borg collective lockbox - or will it be removal of failtimers? These are the sorts of questions for which we will soon have answers.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
I think that was a bit what the original design of the mission tried to achieve.
Infected for example:
First you needed to know the right strategy - focus on one side and bring the generators down to 5 % before destroying anyone. Then destroy the transformer. If you don't have the DPS to do it fast enough (and I think it was not assumed that you had that DPS), use crowd control techniques to stop the nanite spheres from getting to the transformer.
Ultimately, STO's problem is that the difference between a bad build and a good build is ridiculously high. There is no way to design content difficulty around such a divergence. Either you have cake-walks on the high end or impossible missions on the low-end.
The reason we now have these giant hit points bags in Advanced and Elite is because Cryptic tried to reduce the cake-walks on the high-end - if the DPS is enough to melt an enemy in 10 seconds, he can have any amount of firepower and any amount of tricks, he won't have time to use them. But if you need 60 seconds for the same enemy, tricks and firepower could mean it impossible to beat him.
Of course, at least on the forums I get the impression that there is a sizeable minority of players that really don't care about balance. Sure, they might cry if something is underpowered, but something being too strong? Any fix is immediately called a nerf and Cryptic ruining their fun. But all these overpowered things they don't want fixed and all the underpowered things they just ignore lead to the vast power disparity in the game. And that is in the end ruining everyone's fun when they are railroaded into must-have powers to partake in advanced or elite content or ridiculed because they refuse or are not even aware to follow the power.
Is that really what they want? To just repeatedly fail queues for... reasons? It's really really really NOT hard to learn how to equip your ship/play well. Just putting on whatever you randomly find and fits in an equipment slot... or do people even do that? Do they just run with a ship's default white equipment? Do they know about firing arcs? Do they have bridge officers slotted even? I'm struggling to find reasons for such low damage.
I think it's significantly more reasonable to ask that people put even the most minimal amount of effort in being better players than to ask to avoid people that manage to do damage. Doing damage isn't some hardcore super manic number crunching magic, it's just basic competence @_@
Welcome to Star Trek where its mostly one ship and crew on their own and most encounters with other Starfleet ships are as antagonists, discovering why they all died, or guys in need of saving, or various combination of that.
So having the be one player = one ship kind makes the team-based game questionable.
All relegated to a few select groups that test by ISA.
That, now, is the end game.
How many successful MMOs survive long term by balkanizing their customers? The last and first one I recall was Asheron's Call and AC2. UO came close, course corrected impressively, then forgot that graphics actually matter.The others are, at best, on life control from a devoted hard core people with wallets who believe that <idea> cannot fail, only that <idea> will be failed by not enough Green Lantern / Tinkerbell believers.
EQ2 anyone?
STO is slipping into Green Lantern / Tinkerbell believer mode. Clap your hands harder.
I learned back with UO/EQ1 to not fight the trend. Koster and I had some very heated very public discussions on this. When a company decides to give up a cash cow and only pursue the ephemeral 10%... I go into the increasingly rarer "private pug" groups, learn that trolls have taken them over, and yet feel no great pressure to play the dps build of the week. So I play less.
FWIW I did my my last round of Zen. I'm simply playing the market now, anticipating the grownups in Cryptic to finally catch up and realise that it doesn't matter how many one-person fleets are out there (stop the FM hate), how many folks who drop hundreds but don't play hard (stop **** blocking T6 content with unfun HP sponges).
I have no content to play anymore. The T6 content is clearly about joining the private DPS clubs or a fleet. But that is the content I am expected to play. I'm not asking for a leg up, just content that sizes me up and gives me a balanced challenge. Four hours for a single episode is an indication to your customers we are not using our time wisely, the time we are paying you for...
I'm not buying this service to lend meaning to my life. I'm here to zone, burn off some stress like human being who like other human beings do, and I'm not interested in being someone who only has time to tune my leisure to some one else's OCD.
I've been playing the **** out of my g-d games like Civ5 and CIV:AC. So I've taken the cue, I play the dili market and make more with less effort, and I'm intrigued as I play more into Elite:Dangerous. I'd go back to EvE but I cannot tolerate the profound criminal hypocrisy of a company that uses Russian gangster money to support itself and destabilize true organic sector politics.
Anyway. I sure hope the pain is paying off Cryptic. Because it sure feels like STO is supposed to be another short term "no one knows what it is so burn it out" franchise.
Were I'd CBS I'd worry. But from day one everyone has expected ST to be that fad to go away, but except for Tolkien, Star Trek is the one franchise that will outlive everyone alive on this planet right now.
Um...yeah, see, uh, yeah...
NPC Ships (the usual, there are exceptions)
Shield Penetration Resistance: 90% (10% bleed)
Shield Damage Reduction: 14% Energy / 79% Kinetic
Hull Damage Resistance: 0%
Shield Healing: 0 (just regen)
Hull Healing: 0 (just regen)
Player Ships
Shield Penetration Resistance: 95% w/ 5% Energy Absorption (Energy: 5% to Hull, 90% to Shield, 5% to power the servers; Kinetic: 5% to Hull, 95% to Shield)
Shield Damage Reduction: starts to taper off around 90%
Hull Damage Resistance: starts to taper off around 50-60%
Shield Healing: spammed
Hull Healing: spammed
So uh, the NPC ship is going to have more raw shields and hull than a player. IMHO, it's a design sacrifice that they made for the game to keep it casual. If NPCs had better shield damage reduction/hull damage resistance and had the ability to heal, how many players out there wouldn't be able to kill a thing, eh? Instead, you just go with those raw numbers...figure in an expected average DPS...and you can extrapolate a given amount of time for the combat engagement. Adjusting NPC health isn't about difficulty, it's about tweaking the time combat takes...
...cause when we hit up the other side of that coin, the dealing of damage - NPCs are such a non-threat...they've got low average base damage, they've got very low attacks per second, and it's only if somebody in a paper ship aggros the universe that there's any danger as that's all combined from multiple sources.
STO is a monster farm...it's like the King of the Hill episode, Good Hill Hunting. Even Bobby realizes that it's wrong. Folks in STO don't...they chest bump about it.
There's no helping those people.
What I do most of the times is just challenge them to a PvP fight and bang, they're exploding soon after. OP, ignore them. DPSers are less threatening than a Baku. All I see are a bunch of guys who can only take down NPCs honestly faster than average.
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