test content
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc

Suggestion: Put back random star clusters.

gradiigradii Member Posts: 2,824 Arc User
There were plenty of players who really enjoyed this content, regardless of it's low quality. It provided more to do when you're just not feeling like episodes or STF grind, and it's EXPLORING, cuz you know STAR TREK.

Please consider putting the Trek back in Star Trek Online.

if there is a suggestions box section, I did not see it, forum mods feel free to move it there,
(and let me know where the suggestions box is)

"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
Post edited by gradii on

Comments

  • rattler2rattler2 Member, Star Trek Online Moderator Posts: 59,174 Community Moderator
    edited February 2015
    We recently had a poll about what we wanted to see, and Exploration won.
    db80k0m-89201ed8-eadb-45d3-830f-bb2f0d4c0fe7.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcL2ExOGQ4ZWM2LTUyZjQtNDdiMS05YTI1LTVlYmZkYmJkOGM3N1wvZGI4MGswbS04OTIwMWVkOC1lYWRiLTQ1ZDMtODMwZi1iYjJmMGQ0YzBmZTcucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.8G-Pg35Qi8qxiKLjAofaKRH6fmNH3qAAEI628gW0eXc
    I can't take it anymore! Could everyone just chill out for two seconds before something CRAZY happens again?!
    The nut who actually ground out many packs. The resident forum voice of reason (I HAZ FORUM REP! YAY!)
    normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
    colored text = mod mode
  • nileight1nileight1 Member Posts: 249 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    Quality had nothing to do with why they were pulled.

    It had to do with forcing players to play the content they want us to play.

    Not to mention making it harder to farm materials for R&D.
  • seriousdaveseriousdave Member Posts: 2,777 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    I have my own little conspiracy theory about why they removed them, most of it ties in with the crafting revamp.

    In all honesty, qualitywise they were pretty much the same as most patrols *cough*argala*cough* so the excuse that they were removed because the "didn't fit into the game anymore" is bs.

    The real reason:
    Those were easy sources of xp and great for farming all kinds of crafting mats back then.

    Cryptic wants to a) slow our progress, which they've done a hell of a job by now and b) make money.
    Guess what the implemented after the mats farming places got removed, friggin R&D boxes for zen. Then the change to queues so only advanced & elite stuff drops purple mats which is also now near impossible to get thanks to all the changes after DR with the horrendous failrates of mandatory "optionals" and the dead queues in general.
    So what's the only alternative to get those mats? Buy friggin boxes and hope you get what you need.

    So you see cryptic is getting exactly what they want by keeping them out of the game.

    I may read more into this than there might be but that's exactly the aftermath of those changes.
  • peterconnorfirstpeterconnorfirst Member Posts: 6,225 Arc User
    edited February 2015

    I may read more into this than there might be but that's exactly the aftermath of those changes.

    I don't think you did. Sounds about right.
    animated.gif
    Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
    felisean wrote: »
    teamwork to reach a goal is awesome and highly appreciated
  • angrytargangrytarg Member Posts: 11,016 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    (...)

    I may read more into this than there might be but that's exactly the aftermath of those changes.

    I think you are spot on, I share that sentiment. The half-baked marketing-talk they gave for a reasoning just leaves this obvious bitter taste in your mouth.
    lFC4bt2.gif
    ^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
    "No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
    "A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
    "That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
  • warpangelwarpangel Member Posts: 9,427 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    No, those cluster missions were not exploring anything, just killing a few random enemies and/or pressing 'F' on a few random pieces of scenery. The game should have real exploration missions, with mystery and intrigue and dead redshirts, not taking selfies in front of landmarks on planet Whatsitcalled or shooting some aliens just because they're there.

    I don't remember them ever doing that on TV. Where were the weird anomalies, the dangerous creatures, the new life and new civilizations to find and get into cultural misunderstandings with?
  • angrytargangrytarg Member Posts: 11,016 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    warpangel wrote: »
    No, those cluster missions were not exploring anything, just killing a few random enemies and/or pressing 'F' on a few random pieces of scenery. The game should have real exploration missions, with mystery and intrigue and dead redshirts, not taking selfies in front of landmarks on planet Whatsitcalled or shooting some aliens just because they're there.

    I don't remember them ever doing that on TV. Where were the weird anomalies, the dangerous creatures, the new life and new civilizations to find and get into cultural misunderstandings with?

    Aside from the story content being exactly the same, as in killing enemies and pressing "F", exploration is *not* about recreating a TV episode. That's what the episodes are for.

    "Exploration" means facing the unknown which is true even if the resulting missions are rather simple when you have a system that is able to create procedually generated content. In the old exploration content you basically knew the variety of missions you could get, but you never knew the map it was placed on. That *is* exploration. It doesn't mean having a sophisticated written story. That's an episode.

    Exploration like that reflects what the regular Starfleet crew does more than the episodes which are the "super awesome hero" moments. But between saving the universe you are to explore *unknown* sections of space with weird architecture, answering random distress calls and so on.
    lFC4bt2.gif
    ^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
    "No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
    "A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
    "That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
  • warpangelwarpangel Member Posts: 9,427 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    angrytarg wrote: »
    Aside from the story content being exactly the same, as in killing enemies and pressing "F", exploration is *not* about recreating a TV episode. That's what the episodes are for.

    "Exploration" means facing the unknown which is true even if the resulting missions are rather simple when you have a system that is able to create procedually generated content. In the old exploration content you basically knew the variety of missions you could get, but you never knew the map it was placed on. That *is* exploration. It doesn't mean having a sophisticated written story. That's an episode.

    Exploration like that reflects what the regular Starfleet crew does more than the episodes which are the "super awesome hero" moments. But between saving the universe you are to explore *unknown* sections of space with weird architecture, answering random distress calls and so on.

    You knew what map it was placed on, too. Just not what color the ground was or what shape of rock you were pressing 'F' on.

    True, exploration doesn't always need a complicated story. But it does need something interesting, something to drive curiosity, something more than "oh, the ground is orange this time." You shouldn't know how the mission goes ahead of time, because exploration is finding new things, not repeating the same thing you did every other time.

    It doesn't need to be "super awesome hero" stuff, but it should at least be something imporant enough for the captain (or fleet admiral as the case more likely is) to go down himself. Because if you're just going to tag a few rocks and beam back up, you send a team of ensigns.
  • angrytargangrytarg Member Posts: 11,016 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    warpangel wrote: »
    You knew what map it was placed on, too. Just not what color the ground was or what shape of rock you were pressing 'F' on.

    True, exploration doesn't always need a complicated story. But it does need something interesting, something to drive curiosity, something more than "oh, the ground is orange this time." You shouldn't know how the mission goes ahead of time, because exploration is finding new things, not repeating the same thing you did every other time.

    It doesn't need to be "super awesome hero" stuff, but it should at least be something imporant enough for the captain to go down himself. Because if you're just going to tag a few rocks and beam back up, you send a team of ensigns.

    Now you are making the missions worse than they were. I saw some pretty awesome maps back in the day mit huge rock formations, dense vegetation and even some settlements.

    But you are right and I'm not trying to say that the missions weren't exactly unpredictabl, although there was a chance that a scanning mission was interrupted by some "pirates" beaming down. If the system would have had access to *much more* variables like that it would have been more interesting.

    The problem is how to incorporate that in the game. This is why the foundry is, at least to me, avsolutely no alternative or substitute to an exploration system, although many players claim the opposite. Scripted missions can not replace the randomly generated, open-ended gameplay that exploration is supposed to be.

    The thing with the captaing beaming down... well, that's due to the fact that the game was never fit to reflect Star Trek in the first place, but either nobody cared or they just noticed waaaay to late :D
    lFC4bt2.gif
    ^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
    "No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
    "A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
    "That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
  • shpoksshpoks Member Posts: 6,967 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    nileight1 wrote: »
    quality Had Nothing To Do With Why They Were Pulled.

    It Had To Do With Forcing Players To Play The Content They Want Us To Play.

    Not To Mention Making It Harder To Farm Materials For R&d.

    Bingooo!!!
    HQroeLu.jpg
  • edited February 2015
    This content has been removed.
  • architect13architect13 Member Posts: 1,076 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    nileight1 wrote: »
    Quality had nothing to do with why they were pulled.

    It had to do with forcing players to play the content they want us to play.

    Not to mention making it harder to farm materials for R&D.

    Let's not forget players were exploiting the system and doing bridge invites for the exploration chain missions -- can't have players getting to many free doffs.
    Have you tried the new forum on your phone?
  • ralphgraphiteralphgraphite Member Posts: 628 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    nileight1 wrote: »
    Quality had nothing to do with why they were pulled.

    It had to do with forcing players to play the content they want us to play.

    Not to mention making it harder to farm materials for R&D.

    I understood the explanation as to why exploration was pulled. I personally disagreed, and stated so quite passionately here in the forums when it happened, but I understood the reasoning.

    Then DR happened - and we were given a bunch of patrols that had one or two-time story connections, but were functionally no better than the exploration (Kazon heads on other species' in Argala, bugged Farn system patrol, etc). There is no excuse for this, as they were NOT procedurally generated, and they were NOT foundry missions.

    As time has passed, I'm pretty sure you have hit the nail on the head.

    R&D mats being one of the biggest indicators. I used to have a science character that did very little other than scan and run exploration content. I never, ever was wanting mats - and I used to craft very rare kits and Aegis sets fairly frequently.
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,236 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    gradii wrote: »
    There were plenty of players who really enjoyed this content, regardless of it's low quality. It provided more to do when you're just not feeling like episodes or STF grind, and it's EXPLORING, cuz you know STAR TREK.

    Please consider putting the Trek back in Star Trek Online.

    if there is a suggestions box section, I did not see it, forum mods feel free to move it there,
    (and let me know where the suggestions box is)
    Yeah it'd be nice to have some sort of actual exploration to do in the game. :/ the old clusters were about as interesting as cataloguing gaseous anomalies though. Oh wait... in some of hte missions that's exactly what you did.
    nileight1 wrote: »
    Quality had nothing to do with why they were pulled.

    It had to do with forcing players to play the content they want us to play.

    Not to mention making it harder to farm materials for R&D.
    If you beleive that then I have a bridge in Nome to sell you.
    I have my own little conspiracy theory about why they removed them, most of it ties in with the crafting revamp.

    In all honesty, qualitywise they were pretty much the same as most patrols *cough*argala*cough* so the excuse that they were removed because the "didn't fit into the game anymore" is bs.

    The real reason:
    Those were easy sources of xp and great for farming all kinds of crafting mats back then.

    Cryptic wants to a) slow our progress, which they've done a hell of a job by now and b) make money.
    Guess what the implemented after the mats farming places got removed, friggin R&D boxes for zen. Then the change to queues so only advanced & elite stuff drops purple mats which is also now near impossible to get thanks to all the changes after DR with the horrendous failrates of mandatory "optionals" and the dead queues in general.
    So what's the only alternative to get those mats? Buy friggin boxes and hope you get what you need.

    So you see cryptic is getting exactly what they want by keeping them out of the game.

    I may read more into this than there might be but that's exactly the aftermath of those changes.
    Yeah, I agree with that last line. you're reading too far into it. by the time they'd axed the clusters, there were so many ways to get R&D mats that they were superfluous as a source of mats. another thing to consider is that IF you could go there and scan mats like you used to be able to, you'd get mostly COMMONS. the devs irrevocably changed the way the particle scan mini-game works. Nodes are no longer categorized as tech/metal/energy which then give a payout based on the level of the map. The current system just spawns a random type of mat with the odds slanted towards white and excluding anything higher than blue. (as a side note the new blue is about as valuable as the old rank 5/6 stuff) So IF you could grind B'Tran for mats you wouldn't get ANY purples, in fact you'd get mostly whites.
    warpangel wrote: »
    No, those cluster missions were not exploring anything, just killing a few random enemies and/or pressing 'F' on a few random pieces of scenery. The game should have real exploration missions, with mystery and intrigue and dead redshirts, not taking selfies in front of landmarks on planet Whatsitcalled or shooting some aliens just because they're there.

    I don't remember them ever doing that on TV. Where were the weird anomalies, the dangerous creatures, the new life and new civilizations to find and get into cultural misunderstandings with?
    Yeah, they were kinda lame. Sometimes you'd get an interesting one, but not often. One of the space ones was to defend a Federation base from multiple waves of attackers. One of the exterior ones was to defeat a Gorgan invasion. but the majority involved shooting a few random mobs, or scanning a few rocks/artifacts, sometimes both.
    angrytarg wrote: »
    Now you are making the missions worse than they were. I saw some pretty awesome maps back in the day mit huge rock formations, dense vegetation and even some settlements.

    But you are right and I'm not trying to say that the missions weren't exactly unpredictabl, although there was a chance that a scanning mission was interrupted by some "pirates" beaming down. If the system would have had access to *much more* variables like that it would have been more interesting.

    The problem is how to incorporate that in the game. This is why the foundry is, at least to me, avsolutely no alternative or substitute to an exploration system, although many players claim the opposite. Scripted missions can not replace the randomly generated, open-ended gameplay that exploration is supposed to be.
    I will agree that some of the exterior maps were AWESOMe. I even went so far as to document a few for posterity. But the missions generally stank.

    http://marhawkman.deviantart.com/art/Screenshot-2014-02-08-17-20-45-464848348 The mission was to break several random objects. That was it.

    http://marhawkman.deviantart.com/art/Screenshot-2013-09-09-15-56-00-464848761 See above, different map, different prop, same mission.

    http://marhawkman.deviantart.com/art/Rho-Horologii-044-Xi-465851026 Pretty! we actually don't have the ability to replicate this in foundry. sure we can place coral props, but only on maps with other stuff baked in. the mission? Scan rocks.

    http://marhawkman.deviantart.com/art/Iota-Pi-180-465851598 We have several maps with this them of terrain, but the horizon here is awesome. The mission was to shoot some random losers.

    You seem to be laboring under a misconception. STO NEVER had randomly scripted missions. Genesis was a dev tool not part of the actual game. It was used to spit out thousands of semi-random maps that had a paper-thin mission glued on. There was no actual randomization of objectives, the mission scripts were created by hand. The only randomization was in the maps.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    My character Tsin'xing
    Costume_marhawkman_Tsin%27xing_CC_Comic_Page_Blue_488916968.jpg
  • supergirl1611supergirl1611 Member Posts: 809 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    Exploration Clusters were removed for 3 reasons

    1. force us to play public queues to get materials and to make their metrics look better rather than someone sitting in sector space farming anomolies

    2. Sell R&D boxes from Zen store.

    3. The further Monetization of the crafting system. (Remember when crafting used to be simply farm the materials in star clusters for free, Go to memory alpha and craft away. Then came the 2 common and Uncommon unreplicable Materials via dil store and now we have the other 2 ways mentioned above)
  • shpoksshpoks Member Posts: 6,967 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    If you beleive that then I have a bridge in Nome to sell you.

    Seen how you believe the explanation of "players getting lost" and "game being too big to download", no wonder that you came to own that bridge in Nome in the first place. :rolleyes:
    HQroeLu.jpg
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,236 Arc User
    edited February 2015
    shpoks wrote: »
    Seen how you believe the explanation of "players getting lost" and "game being too big to download", no wonder that you came to own that bridge in Nome in the first place. :rolleyes:
    Actually.... When I first played the game #1 DID happen. The tutorial pointed me to go explore in the cluster near Earth and when I was done I went "now what?".... nothing. Granted I was smart enough to just go do a different mission, but it was confusing to have the Tutorial tell you to do something for no real reason.

    As for size.... It's NOT an exaggeration to say that the clusters had thousands of missions. There were 14 clusters, and different missions for Feds and KDF. A conservative estimate of 100 missions per faction at each location gives you 2800 missions.

    A full download/install with that took HOURS. I know because I had to do it once. It literally took pretty much all night.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    My character Tsin'xing
    Costume_marhawkman_Tsin%27xing_CC_Comic_Page_Blue_488916968.jpg
Sign In or Register to comment.