You can defend FAW if you like.. .its hardly the most broken thing in the game anymore. Its still on the face of it a really really really bad mmo mechanic.
Imagine if you would you where plyaing a generic Fantasty MMO... in this MMO people swing big swords around. One skill lets you swing the sword around and hit everything in a 360 degree arc around you... hitting each one of them an extra time over a normal swing, for 40-60% more dmg then a normal swing... and had over 50% uptime. Sounds like a great mechanic doesn't it?
FAW is just a bad idea... I have talked with Developers of other AAA MMOs and when talking about FAW in STO, heard them honestly bust a gut laughing. Its terrible game design.
You misrepresent the issue and create a false demonization of a very simple skill.
Imagine a MMO where you get a "double hit" spell.. or a "dual wield"... where you activate a potion or special skill that allows you to hit 2 targets side-by-side at once... and all other aspects of your attack are the same. Hrm... Sounds like some very common ones to MMOs to me.
Demonize it all you want. You're trying to create a ****storm, where one doesn't belong.
how is orbiting with FAW good piloting? a Beamboat has 360 degrees of effective engagement and FAW means you don't even need to have a target. 99% of DPS leaguers run BFAW builds-because BFAW works for DPS'ing-it gives higher averages than point-attack does.
fact: Point-Damage dealers don't even get a Parse in DPS league. (When was the last time you saw a Bird of Prey, for instance, even qualify at 10K?)
further, using keybinds the right way, you can cycle your boff-buffs and captain buffs by reflex alone-it's just shy of automating your play. "Good Piloting" is tertiary-it may be the difference between a 50K parse and a 30k parse, but random luck on the procs can account for it just about as well.
the "piloting" skill ends up boiling down to knowing the script, and timing when you tap spacebar for your buffs. Most DPS league boils down to builds, which how you GET the situation where changes to known broken mechanics threaten to kick people willy-nilly off the channels.
in a way, it's a funny parallel to what was happening in PvP three years ago-a lot of people that were powerful got godhammered when Cryptic revised/pulled the Subnuke Doffs, ditto when they revised the Phaser Proc back in the stone ages.
The easiest adaptation would be a clean-slate reset of the channels-make everyone re-qualify under the new rules, while keeping an archive of past performance under the old rules, and making that archive a publicly linked site with maybe some articles on what's changed, why it changed, and how those old records were accomplished.
Ummm... does my fed tac in a DHC/DBB Kumari that parses 56k DPS in ISA count as a point damage ship as you put it?
You misrepresent the issue and create a false demonization of a very simple skill.
Imagine a MMO where you get a "double hit" spell.. or a "dual wield"... where you activate a potion or special skill that allows you to hit 2 targets side-by-side at once... and all other aspects of your attack are the same. Hrm... Sounds like some very common ones to MMOs to me.
Demonize it all you want. You're trying to create a ****storm, where one doesn't belong.
You clearly don't play many other MMOs... pretty much every game designer ever to touch an MMO has always REDUCED the dmg on AOE skills. Making it a trade... Lower single target dmg for higher AOE DMG.
FAW breaks all the conventions of an AOE skill. It doesn't as you suggest simply double your dmg by allowing you to fire on 2 targets. It increases it as well cause for some crazy reason Cryptic has it adding pure dmg and extra shots.
You will also have a hard time finding another game where your AOE skills don't still require a target. In general developers try and keep there games from becoming mindless space bar mashing affairs. Cryptic does the opposite whenever they have the chance.
Well since I never used [Pen] and Plasma doping..
My scores wont be hard to reproduce at all.
And I'm glad they made these changes.
Finally my plasma beams will be doing the most plasma burn damage in game(and rightfully so !), not some stupid crtD AP beams.
Nuke the scorboard. Its filled with utter trash scores, and recluse squads.
Recluse squad scores should not even be allowed imo.
Well since I never used [Pen] and Plasma doping..
My scores wont be hard to reproduce at all.
And I'm glad they made these changes.
Finally my plasma beams will be doing the most plasma burn damage in game(and rightfully so !), not some stupid crtD AP beams.
Nuke the scorboard. Its filled with utter trash scores, and recluse squads.
Everyones numbers will be effected. EVERYONE.
The thing they are fixing is the Delta Rep Tier 2 Amour Pen trait... that has the wrong numbers coded it in... and also has some strange stacking properties. From what I have seen if your in a map with anyone running this trait... chances are your numbers are inflated.
Not saying every run for every person not running it... however if you have been running STFs with people from the channels I would say the chances of being in many runs where at least 2-3 people where using that trait to leading to stacking would be low.
To be honest it would probably be best to avoid acknowledging the non channel replies. We know what we're talking about, and they obviously don't. While sharing that expertise is good, this thread doesn't seem the place for it. Lets let the admins get the input they wanted without cluttering up the thread.
The thing they are fixing is the Delta Rep Tier 2 Amour Pen trait... that has the wrong numbers coded it in... and also has some strange stacking properties. From what I have seen if your in a map with anyone running this trait... chances are your numbers are inflated.
Not saying every run for every person not running it... however if you have been running STFs with people from the channels I would say the chances of being in many runs where at least 2-3 people where using that trait to leading to stacking would be low.
Not using that trait either, but I hear what you're saying. Still I've ran so many Stfs, I have a pretty good idea where I stand, scoring wise.
(I use dyson 16% crit severity, rom 4% crit chance, nukara aux offense trait and the stacking crit chance trait)
To be honest it would probably be best to avoid acknowledging the non channel replies. We know what we're talking about, and they obviously don't. While sharing that expertise is good, this thread doesn't seem the place for it. Lets let the admins get the input they wanted without cluttering up the thread.
I must agree... the arbitrary rage over simplistic things, the almost complete misunderstanding of how things work... They're hating just to hate at this point.
The problem is both sides are right and wrong. There is no skill in buffing. How many of these buffs are activated vs automatic. Some skill is required in flying. I use DBB and Petal to the metal. That means more strafing runs. I also try to get flanking damage and on a sphere and cure that is not always easy. There is skill to piloting.
Bfaw was a good idea at the time as it's original intent was to allow broad firing of cruisers while being able to target allies for healing. It got op with over capping. Beam arrays were never suppose to do more damage then dhcs. Escorts were never meant to be doing beam boats.
Not sure why these arguments are here as this thread is meant to be a bureaucratic decision. The game changes and this channels is adapting.
Reset it all once Cryptic have rectified the latest broken things. People who can do great DPS without Neutronic Torp/Plasma Doping etc. etc. will be able to qualify again with no problem at all.
If your high DPS is reliant on those broken game mechanics then it may be time for you to rethink your build.
A player posted on these forums the other day that he wanted to increase his DPS. Was he:
A) Given advice about piloting, keybinds, activating powers in the correct order
or
Given a list of broken things and told he had to use them all on his build to be taken seriously?
"I'm not big on telepaths myself. I'm not big on guns either. But if everyone else has them, I want to make sure I can get my hands on the biggest one I can."
With the upcoming nerfs to Enhanced Armor Pen (Delat T2 trait) and Embassy Console Plasma Burn; we the admins of the DPS channels and League are now faced with a conundrum.
These two nerfs are going to impact everyone's DPS, some a lot more than others. We're going to have a situation where most of the people in 75K channel will no longer be able to reach those numbers. Probably half the people in 50k and 30k will have to be moved down 1 channel.
It will still be possible to parse over 30k and 50k, there just won't be an easy way to do so.
So in light of this the admins are discussing a couple of ways to deal with the situation, but we currently can't come to an agreement.
The majority of the admins want to clear the DPS league of any parses over 30k DPS, then give people 2 weeks to requalify and re-upload a new parse without Armor Pen and Plasma Burn. After 2 weeks we'll go through and compair the League table to the channel populations and remove players from 50k and 30k.
This is what I, personally, am in favor of. The first option seems to be to be fair, as frankly everyone over 30k was likely impacted. Even while not everyone doped, it's a good bet that I'm one of the few over 50k who didn't use EAP, and I doped, and even if I'm wrong, it's silly to suggest that they got there with a team full of EAP/dope free people, and speed is one of the factors in dps. A 2 week waiting time allows for people who still belong in those channels to stay there, and should there be future power creep, those who take advantage of it will have a clear path to get into those higher channels, the same they always have. I am incentivised to step up my piloting and swap to DBB's by this, which is something I should have done a while back, and since one of the goals of the DPS-leagues is to encourage people to push themselves, this feels, to me, like it's very much in line with the league's standards.
The second option seems to me more likely to favor recluse requests and people avoiding ISA if they don't think they can cut it, neither of which I think are healthy for the queue. Furthermore there will be some players who feel personally targeted by that option, which is not good for those people nor the dps league's integrity as an organization.
SCM - Crystal C. (S) - [00:12] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 8.63M(713.16K) - Fed Sci
The majority of the admins want to clear the DPS league of any parses over 30k DPS, then give people 2 weeks to requalify and re-upload a new parse without Armor Pen and Plasma Burn. After 2 weeks we'll go through and compair the League table to the channel populations and remove players from 50k and 30k.
A few admins want to maintain the League as it is now, and kick people out of the channels on a case by case basis. A group of the high end DPSers will still be able to get very large numbers in record runs with a highly specialized team.
Please let us know what you think and/or if you have any suggestions.[/I]
What I think:
1.) Place a hard freeze on everything for a week to give people a chance to feel it out and readjust. During that one week grace period, make announcements that everyone needs to join DPS-Public in order to reinsert themselves into the process. Then do a complete purge of the 10k/30k/50k/75k/Prime channels. Then start parsing from DPS-Public and re-inviting people.
Part of the problem was the manner in which people first started interacting with the DPS League. I was only vaguely aware of it. One of the admins did a wide area sweep of PESTF for ISA runs and populated the 10K channel (that is exactly how I got introduced). Anyone that didn't find their way in had to join DPS-Public then find their way in. If everyone enters via DPS-Public you can manage the chatter a bit better. If you have a build question, take it to DPS-Public. If you want to do diarrhea cartwheels so everyone pays attention to you, get a warning then a swift punt out of the DPS channels if things do not change.
2.) Maybe take a look at how admins police low dps runs. The 20% rule seems fair enough. I just don't think the observation process is balanced. This is what I witnessed in the 10k chat last night -> An admin parsed an ISA run and posted it to the 10K channel. He did 89K, another person did 45K, I think a third was somewhere around 13K and the last two were at 8100-ish and 7800-ish. The admin then decided to take the hard line "If you can't do 10K you shouldn't be here, period". While I agree with that, I take issue with how the admin observed the results. If you can push 90K, you can pretty much do the lion's share of the damage before the lowly 10ker can get in range to shoot. I realize that waltzing in and just LOL-BFAWing everything is the preferred approach since you can beat the timer, but the 10Ker has to approach things slightly different (Cube, then Sphere then Generators). When you undercut the 10Ker who is operating in a different manner, there is no way that they are going to parse above the watermark. If admins are going to slum in 10K to test the waters, try to use an alt that is somewhere closer to 30K or 50K. If you just want to slam marginal 10K players I suggest that you do monthly purges of the 10K channel instead (they can get games in DPS-Public).
My Vote is wipe 30k and Up to reset the field. However i would retain the old records like you guys did with ISE(S9) records so at least the historical record will exist to compare the new records with.
These changes are welcome and come Thursday it'll be a whole new ballgame of people trying to reach for the stars.
My outsider's perspective is to reboot. People have to requalify for things all the time. In fact it should be a requirement periodically. And unless I am completely misunderstanding the process, isn't everyone already doing most of what needs to be done for that regularly anyway?
My Vote is wipe 30k and Up to reset the field. However i would retain the old records like you guys did with ISE(S9) records so at least the historical record will exist to compare the new records with.
These changes are welcome and come Thursday it'll be a whole new ballgame of people trying to reach for the stars.
Sure but I'd like see a big asterisk (*) next to each of the Dopers names, and ban them entry to the Hall of Fame.
just wipe all the channels and reinstate the 20k channel
i know y'all feel it was too much to moderate but you just forced more folks to use the lower channel and as such didn't mitigate your moderation work needed just moved it to a faster scrolling channel.
im a science guy that has not used plasma doping nor pen so i wont have troubles getting back in.
Also, in my opinion, it is much more stimulating trying to achieve realistic numbers than numbers resulting from using broken stuff.
I hope you don't mind me elaborating a bit on this and going a bit off topic.
If you look at the ISE S9 ranking list, you will notice that a lot of individual records were done in February and March. For those who don't remember, back then there was an issue which was allowing pets to inherit and retain some abilities from their owners, like APB3. That issue was fixed on March, 27th. Now, I know for a fact that some high ranked players used that broken mechanic (they even used FAW spamming widow fighters to increase number of betas on targets). I am not implying that all of the players with Feb/March record date used broken pets themselves or had teammates using them, of course, but it does make me wonder how come we don't see many records with a post-patch date on that list. Surely some of the players just didn't bother to upload higher score or even do dps runs, but all of them? Mind you, we didn't have a reset back then.
Current situation is somewhat similar. If you don't go with the reset, I'm afraid we won't see many new individual records in, let's say, top-50 or top-100. One could say we will be stuck with unrealistic and, for many players, unachievable numbers and who wants that? I'll never do amazing dps, simply because I don't care that much about it (I parse myself in pugs) but I do like the feeling of improvement when I break my own record or rank up in the league. However, having a bunch of players with a higher record who got there exclusively by using broken stuff is, for me, even more discouraging than pay to dps (aka upgrading) that happened in the week after DR came live. Of course, respect to those who are genuinely awesome players, you know who you are
Yupp..., can't help but stand by the old "we're stronger together then apart" saying .
Well that and the common sense understanding that gaming companies build games for a median player performance level and not a top 10% / bottom 90% type of scenario that the DPS channels encourage .
So your argument is to lower the standard of all players in the hopes that cryptic will then somehow dumb-down the game? Are the hitpoints on advanced/elite too much for you and others? Not like the AI actually makes intelligent decisions with its extremely limited array of abilities.
Yeah, well while you're at it, perhaps you should question the ethics and the wisdom of publicly publishing the @handles of participants of your channels on the web without the permission of the owner of said @handles ... , considering that a public list like that is a service to one crowd only -- gold sellers who collect @handles for their spammy ingame mails .
I can't even remember the last time I got a spam mail in game...because there is a setting in your options that will take care of that.
I hope you don't mind me elaborating a bit on this and going a bit off topic.
If you look at the ISE S9 ranking list, you will notice that a lot of individual records were done in February and March. For those who don't remember, back then there was an issue which was allowing pets to inherit and retain some abilities from their owners, like APB3. That issue was fixed on March, 27th. Now, I know for a fact that some high ranked players used that broken mechanic (they even used FAW spamming widow fighters to increase number of betas on targets). I am not implying that all of the players with Feb/March record date used broken pets themselves or had teammates using them, of course, but it does make me wonder how come we don't see many records with a post-patch date on that list. Surely some of the players just didn't bother to upload higher score or even do dps runs, but all of them? Mind you, we didn't have a reset back then.
Current situation is somewhat similar. If you don't go with the reset, I'm afraid we won't see many new individual records in, let's say, top-50 or top-100. One could say we will be stuck with unrealistic and, for many players, unachievable numbers and who wants that? I'll never do amazing dps, simply because I don't care that much about it (I parse myself in pugs) but I do like the feeling of improvement when I break my own record or rank up in the league. However, having a bunch of players with a higher record who got there exclusively by using broken stuff is, for me, even more discouraging than pay to dps (aka upgrading) that happened in the week after DR came live. Of course, respect to those who are genuinely awesome players, you know who you are
This is very true. For me the league is more than just a place to find like minded teammates. It's a player invented achievement system that means a lot more to me than any accolade in STO. Without wiping the records clean, we're no longer comparing apples to apples. Moving up in the rankings and whatnot will prove far more difficult, and won't really tell you where you stand compared to everyone else anyway.
I think I agree with onerats and olympus on those points in general. As a method of self-achievement, it rings hollow when the top scores are taken up by game mechanics that outstripped the previous set for a long time, then were reversed. I've been in some other games before where I achived X, or Y, and amongst my friends I could brag about it, but knew they could never replicate it not out of skill but because the game mechanics changed and the gameplay was different after years of play. When my accomplishment was wiped clean later on (not forgotten, just re-set) I was okay with it.
I've to be honest with you Jena. Personally, i'd reset everything, do a total wipe of the leaderboard and the dps channels. The values we have actually are influenced not only by plasma doping (not everybody did that), but by bugged EAP as well. So, delete delete delete, don't worry about the consequences, we'll only have more reliable channels
I may have exaggerated..slightly. but, y['all do post vids and those vids show discoball engagement-repeating FAW and Scims.
(hell, I've gotten 20-30K hits with a BoP before myself. The problem ends up being spike vs. average.)
Question I have about your Kumari-did you manage that in a PUG without your team stacking APB via BFAW and Tholian pets?
that ALSO makes a difference.
It was a random 10k/30k channel team and although I do not recall the ships that we in it, I do remember there not being a recluse or scimitar. My ship weapons are elachi DHCs, Elachi DBB, Wide Angle Disruptor DHC, Elachi Turret and Bio-Mol Disruptor turret. My attack patterns were APO3/APB1 and weapon buffs were CSVs & BO3. And to be 100% accurate, it was the Andorian Charal T5-U not the actual Kumari variant.
I am for reset. Just make from it "the season of plasma doping", wipe everything and start new "season". If people are no longer able to reach required numbers why they should remain in that bracket?
I've to be honest with you Jena. Personally, i'd reset everything, do a total wipe of the leaderboard and the dps channels. The values we have actually are influenced not only by plasma doping (not everybody did that), but by bugged EAP as well. So, delete delete delete, don't worry about the consequences, we'll only have more reliable channels
Might clear out some of the 10k riffraff as well. It was getting a bit unruly.
You can defend FAW if you like.. .its hardly the most broken thing in the game anymore. Its still on the face of it a really really really bad mmo mechanic.
FAW was fine for a long time (remember dhc escorts?), FAW was the tanks thing. Aggroing all over the place (and tbh it would be easy to give it inherent +threat, which would discourage some players from using it). No, FAW as an ability is fine. The problem is the thing around it: Energy has become inexhaustable. There were times you couldnt fly with 8 beams without sacrificing dps. Then came 2pc Omega-Weapon-set, which had some impact. Then came experimentell romulan array, which had a big impact, plasma was more powerful than AP, and AP+the beam was more powerful than pure AP. A little rainbowish was more powerful than pure blood.
And now? Not only do we have more weapon drain resistencies (bounty hunters friend, spire warpcore, (Marion)). And as a sidenote, Marion was once very powerful, now its only important to get .x % more dps. No, we also got energy en masse. Beams even got overcap, which DHCs lack.
Remove plasmonic leech and the astika-trait from game, or half one and free the other from the dependency with flowcaps. This will give you far more than revamping every BO-ability in this game. Even if you can hold your weaponpower on the previous level, you will have less shields, aux and engines, hence less resistencies, heals and defence. And if you die, your dps is lost.
FAW has become broken, but only as a sympton. Whats really broken in this game is energymanagement.
Comments
You misrepresent the issue and create a false demonization of a very simple skill.
Imagine a MMO where you get a "double hit" spell.. or a "dual wield"... where you activate a potion or special skill that allows you to hit 2 targets side-by-side at once... and all other aspects of your attack are the same. Hrm... Sounds like some very common ones to MMOs to me.
Demonize it all you want. You're trying to create a ****storm, where one doesn't belong.
Ummm... does my fed tac in a DHC/DBB Kumari that parses 56k DPS in ISA count as a point damage ship as you put it?
You clearly don't play many other MMOs... pretty much every game designer ever to touch an MMO has always REDUCED the dmg on AOE skills. Making it a trade... Lower single target dmg for higher AOE DMG.
FAW breaks all the conventions of an AOE skill. It doesn't as you suggest simply double your dmg by allowing you to fire on 2 targets. It increases it as well cause for some crazy reason Cryptic has it adding pure dmg and extra shots.
You will also have a hard time finding another game where your AOE skills don't still require a target. In general developers try and keep there games from becoming mindless space bar mashing affairs. Cryptic does the opposite whenever they have the chance.
My scores wont be hard to reproduce at all.
And I'm glad they made these changes.
Finally my plasma beams will be doing the most plasma burn damage in game(and rightfully so !), not some stupid crtD AP beams.
Nuke the scorboard. Its filled with utter trash scores, and recluse squads.
Recluse squad scores should not even be allowed imo.
Everyones numbers will be effected. EVERYONE.
The thing they are fixing is the Delta Rep Tier 2 Amour Pen trait... that has the wrong numbers coded it in... and also has some strange stacking properties. From what I have seen if your in a map with anyone running this trait... chances are your numbers are inflated.
Not saying every run for every person not running it... however if you have been running STFs with people from the channels I would say the chances of being in many runs where at least 2-3 people where using that trait to leading to stacking would be low.
Not using that trait either, but I hear what you're saying. Still I've ran so many Stfs, I have a pretty good idea where I stand, scoring wise.
(I use dyson 16% crit severity, rom 4% crit chance, nukara aux offense trait and the stacking crit chance trait)
I must agree... the arbitrary rage over simplistic things, the almost complete misunderstanding of how things work... They're hating just to hate at this point.
Bfaw was a good idea at the time as it's original intent was to allow broad firing of cruisers while being able to target allies for healing. It got op with over capping. Beam arrays were never suppose to do more damage then dhcs. Escorts were never meant to be doing beam boats.
Not sure why these arguments are here as this thread is meant to be a bureaucratic decision. The game changes and this channels is adapting.
If your high DPS is reliant on those broken game mechanics then it may be time for you to rethink your build.
A player posted on these forums the other day that he wanted to increase his DPS. Was he:
A) Given advice about piloting, keybinds, activating powers in the correct order
or
Guess.
Free Tibet!
This is what I, personally, am in favor of. The first option seems to be to be fair, as frankly everyone over 30k was likely impacted. Even while not everyone doped, it's a good bet that I'm one of the few over 50k who didn't use EAP, and I doped, and even if I'm wrong, it's silly to suggest that they got there with a team full of EAP/dope free people, and speed is one of the factors in dps. A 2 week waiting time allows for people who still belong in those channels to stay there, and should there be future power creep, those who take advantage of it will have a clear path to get into those higher channels, the same they always have. I am incentivised to step up my piloting and swap to DBB's by this, which is something I should have done a while back, and since one of the goals of the DPS-leagues is to encourage people to push themselves, this feels, to me, like it's very much in line with the league's standards.
The second option seems to me more likely to favor recluse requests and people avoiding ISA if they don't think they can cut it, neither of which I think are healthy for the queue. Furthermore there will be some players who feel personally targeted by that option, which is not good for those people nor the dps league's integrity as an organization.
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!
What I think:
1.) Place a hard freeze on everything for a week to give people a chance to feel it out and readjust. During that one week grace period, make announcements that everyone needs to join DPS-Public in order to reinsert themselves into the process. Then do a complete purge of the 10k/30k/50k/75k/Prime channels. Then start parsing from DPS-Public and re-inviting people.
Part of the problem was the manner in which people first started interacting with the DPS League. I was only vaguely aware of it. One of the admins did a wide area sweep of PESTF for ISA runs and populated the 10K channel (that is exactly how I got introduced). Anyone that didn't find their way in had to join DPS-Public then find their way in. If everyone enters via DPS-Public you can manage the chatter a bit better. If you have a build question, take it to DPS-Public. If you want to do diarrhea cartwheels so everyone pays attention to you, get a warning then a swift punt out of the DPS channels if things do not change.
2.) Maybe take a look at how admins police low dps runs. The 20% rule seems fair enough. I just don't think the observation process is balanced. This is what I witnessed in the 10k chat last night -> An admin parsed an ISA run and posted it to the 10K channel. He did 89K, another person did 45K, I think a third was somewhere around 13K and the last two were at 8100-ish and 7800-ish. The admin then decided to take the hard line "If you can't do 10K you shouldn't be here, period". While I agree with that, I take issue with how the admin observed the results. If you can push 90K, you can pretty much do the lion's share of the damage before the lowly 10ker can get in range to shoot. I realize that waltzing in and just LOL-BFAWing everything is the preferred approach since you can beat the timer, but the 10Ker has to approach things slightly different (Cube, then Sphere then Generators). When you undercut the 10Ker who is operating in a different manner, there is no way that they are going to parse above the watermark. If admins are going to slum in 10K to test the waters, try to use an alt that is somewhere closer to 30K or 50K. If you just want to slam marginal 10K players I suggest that you do monthly purges of the 10K channel instead (they can get games in DPS-Public).
These changes are welcome and come Thursday it'll be a whole new ballgame of people trying to reach for the stars.
Sure but I'd like see a big asterisk (*) next to each of the Dopers names, and ban them entry to the Hall of Fame.
i know y'all feel it was too much to moderate but you just forced more folks to use the lower channel and as such didn't mitigate your moderation work needed just moved it to a faster scrolling channel.
im a science guy that has not used plasma doping nor pen so i wont have troubles getting back in.
I hope you don't mind me elaborating a bit on this and going a bit off topic.
If you look at the ISE S9 ranking list, you will notice that a lot of individual records were done in February and March. For those who don't remember, back then there was an issue which was allowing pets to inherit and retain some abilities from their owners, like APB3. That issue was fixed on March, 27th. Now, I know for a fact that some high ranked players used that broken mechanic (they even used FAW spamming widow fighters to increase number of betas on targets). I am not implying that all of the players with Feb/March record date used broken pets themselves or had teammates using them, of course, but it does make me wonder how come we don't see many records with a post-patch date on that list. Surely some of the players just didn't bother to upload higher score or even do dps runs, but all of them? Mind you, we didn't have a reset back then.
Current situation is somewhat similar. If you don't go with the reset, I'm afraid we won't see many new individual records in, let's say, top-50 or top-100. One could say we will be stuck with unrealistic and, for many players, unachievable numbers and who wants that? I'll never do amazing dps, simply because I don't care that much about it (I parse myself in pugs) but I do like the feeling of improvement when I break my own record or rank up in the league. However, having a bunch of players with a higher record who got there exclusively by using broken stuff is, for me, even more discouraging than pay to dps (aka upgrading) that happened in the week after DR came live. Of course, respect to those who are genuinely awesome players, you know who you are
So your argument is to lower the standard of all players in the hopes that cryptic will then somehow dumb-down the game? Are the hitpoints on advanced/elite too much for you and others? Not like the AI actually makes intelligent decisions with its extremely limited array of abilities.
I can't even remember the last time I got a spam mail in game...because there is a setting in your options that will take care of that.
Of course, can't be bothered to understand mechanics so why would you be bothered to change a mail setting in your options. Makes sense now.
This is very true. For me the league is more than just a place to find like minded teammates. It's a player invented achievement system that means a lot more to me than any accolade in STO. Without wiping the records clean, we're no longer comparing apples to apples. Moving up in the rankings and whatnot will prove far more difficult, and won't really tell you where you stand compared to everyone else anyway.
It was a random 10k/30k channel team and although I do not recall the ships that we in it, I do remember there not being a recluse or scimitar. My ship weapons are elachi DHCs, Elachi DBB, Wide Angle Disruptor DHC, Elachi Turret and Bio-Mol Disruptor turret. My attack patterns were APO3/APB1 and weapon buffs were CSVs & BO3. And to be 100% accurate, it was the Andorian Charal T5-U not the actual Kumari variant.
Might clear out some of the 10k riffraff as well. It was getting a bit unruly.
+1 for a total wipe, not just 30k+
FAW was fine for a long time (remember dhc escorts?), FAW was the tanks thing. Aggroing all over the place (and tbh it would be easy to give it inherent +threat, which would discourage some players from using it). No, FAW as an ability is fine. The problem is the thing around it: Energy has become inexhaustable. There were times you couldnt fly with 8 beams without sacrificing dps. Then came 2pc Omega-Weapon-set, which had some impact. Then came experimentell romulan array, which had a big impact, plasma was more powerful than AP, and AP+the beam was more powerful than pure AP. A little rainbowish was more powerful than pure blood.
And now? Not only do we have more weapon drain resistencies (bounty hunters friend, spire warpcore, (Marion)). And as a sidenote, Marion was once very powerful, now its only important to get .x % more dps. No, we also got energy en masse. Beams even got overcap, which DHCs lack.
Remove plasmonic leech and the astika-trait from game, or half one and free the other from the dependency with flowcaps. This will give you far more than revamping every BO-ability in this game. Even if you can hold your weaponpower on the previous level, you will have less shields, aux and engines, hence less resistencies, heals and defence. And if you die, your dps is lost.
FAW has become broken, but only as a sympton. Whats really broken in this game is energymanagement.