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Additional Rewards Throughout Star Trek Online
pwgroverclvlnd
Member Posts: 11 Cryptic Developer
We are pleased to announce a large-scale improvement to rewards to Star Trek Online. Over the past few months, we have been trickling out some minor changes, but now the bulk of the improvements we have been working on is complete and will be available this coming Thursday, February 26th.
The changes we made were based on your feedback, as well as extensive data mining of things like completion times, participation and success rates. The main goal we had in mind was to treat Skill Points, Expertise, and Dilithium more like a time currency that is, you play for X minutes you will earn Y rewards. Although this will never be an exact science, we wanted to ensure that time invested would earn you similar rates of these rewards across the game regardless of what you choose to play. This mostly meant an increase or addition of rewards to much of the game content, but in a few cases, there were reductions where some content was over-rewarding. What we did was look at actual playtime data, as well as our own internal playtesting, and normalized the rewards across content like patrols, queues, adventure zones, missions, etc. Not every piece of content has been fully updated, but most of the primary content was adjusted with this philosophy in mind.
PvE Queues:
Sector Patrols (Delta Quadrant and Tau Dewa Sector Block):
Adventure/Battle Zones:
Missions:
These changes should be a vast improvement to your reward experience in Star Trek Online. Although this is the bulk of the changes we have been working on, we have a few more changes planned in the pipeline. We will also be monitoring playtimes, participation and success rates of game content and continue to adjust rewards as needed. We look forward to you enjoying the new improvements and, more importantly, your feedback.
Charles Gray
Lead Content Designer
Star Trek Online
The changes we made were based on your feedback, as well as extensive data mining of things like completion times, participation and success rates. The main goal we had in mind was to treat Skill Points, Expertise, and Dilithium more like a time currency that is, you play for X minutes you will earn Y rewards. Although this will never be an exact science, we wanted to ensure that time invested would earn you similar rates of these rewards across the game regardless of what you choose to play. This mostly meant an increase or addition of rewards to much of the game content, but in a few cases, there were reductions where some content was over-rewarding. What we did was look at actual playtime data, as well as our own internal playtesting, and normalized the rewards across content like patrols, queues, adventure zones, missions, etc. Not every piece of content has been fully updated, but most of the primary content was adjusted with this philosophy in mind.
PvE Queues:
- PvE queues have had their Skill Point and Expertise rewards increased significantly. For most, this is approximately a three-fold increase.
- Dilithium rewards for Normal difficulty PvE queues have been increased from 360 to 480.
Sector Patrols (Delta Quadrant and Tau Dewa Sector Block):
- Dilithium rewards have been added to the sector patrols. The amount of Dilithium varies for each patrol based on their expected play time, but you can expect to earn somewhere around 480 Dilithium for a typical Patrol.
- Skill Point and Expertise rewards have been adjusted so they give a relative amount to one another for the expected play time. For the most part, this meant a reduction in Skill points and Expertise for Delta quadrant Patrols as they were far over-rewarding compared to the rest of the game.
- A 30-minute cooldown has been built into the sector doors for patrols preventing player from re-entering the same patrol until this timer is complete. This timer starts after the mission is completed, similar to the cooldowns found on PvE Queues. Patrol completion times vary greatly from patrol to patrol and from player to player. Adding a cooldown times allows us to keep the rewards relatively high, but still keep them normalized and acts failsafe in the event certain loopholes or exploits develop.
- Tau Dewa Sector Block patrols now each reward 10 Romulan Marks upon completion of that individual patrol, and there is no longer a daily mission that needs to be obtained in order to earn mark rewards from these patrols. This should make them functionally the same as their Delta Quadrant counterparts.
Adventure/Battle Zones:
- All Adventure Zone and Battle Zone missions award Skill Points and Expertise for completion.
- We added Elite Marks (Borg Neural Processors, Ancient Power Cells, Voth Cybernetic Implants, and Isomorphic Injections) to Adventure/Battle Zones. We wanted to respond to feedback that there were not enough places to earn elite marks outside of PvE Queues:
- Borg Neural Processors have been added as a once per day reward to the following missions on the Defera Invasion Zone: Modus Operandi, Getting to the Bottom of Things, Uninvited Guests, Counter Offensive
- Ancient Power Cells have been added as a once per day reward to the following missions on the Kobali Prime Adventure Zone: At the Gates, The Last Stand
- Note that you can already earn Voth Cybernetic Implants by defeating a V-Rex on the Voth Ground Battle Zone and the Undine Isomorphic Injections from defeating the Planet Killer in the Undine Space Battlezone in the Solanae Dyson Sphere.
Missions:
- Missions found in the episode journal will reward Dilithium for both first time play (a large bonus amount) and replay (a smaller amount).
- Skill Point and Expertise rewards for mission replay have been increased (by an additional 25% in most cases).
- First-play rewards for repeatable Delta Rising missions have been improved from Mk XIII Rare rewards to Mk XIII Very Rare rewards. Replay rewards for those missions remain as Mk XII Rare rewards.
These changes should be a vast improvement to your reward experience in Star Trek Online. Although this is the bulk of the changes we have been working on, we have a few more changes planned in the pipeline. We will also be monitoring playtimes, participation and success rates of game content and continue to adjust rewards as needed. We look forward to you enjoying the new improvements and, more importantly, your feedback.
Charles Gray
Lead Content Designer
Star Trek Online
Cryptic Studios Team Member
Post edited by pwgroverclvlnd on
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Rabble rabble I been here for years rabble rabble I want the dil for all of the missions I did back in the beta rabble rabble
Thanks most honorable giver of loot.
That aside, I will say I like the changes overall.
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As a suggestion based on the changes to Delta patrols, can we reinstate the rewards we had in Tau Dewa that were 17x too much, but also add a 30m cooldown there to compensate? I don't know, sometimes I'd rather be fighting Gorn or Tal Shiar instead of Hierarchy or Kazon.
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I sure hope this brings balance to force
Tribble patch notes are separate from this this post. You can find them here.
All in all, a good step forward!
But there's one point that's unclear: "Tau Dewa Sector Block patrols now each reward 10 Romulan Marks upon completion of that individual patrol, and there is no longer a daily mission that needs to be obtained in order to earn mark rewards from these patrols."
So how about getting the Daily Bonus for Romulan Marks from doing the patrols, how will that work now? We get it after the first patrol, like in Delta patrols? Or has it been disconnected from the Tau Dewa patrols completely?
any chance we could get the chocolate ration looked at?
The above is for Holodeck patch notes.
They never appeared on Tribble.
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i have learnt that no matter what he says, anytime pwgroverclvlnd posts there is a huge nerf incoming.
id just like to know once and for all: how many hours gameplay are you shooting for per lvl after 60?
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Snipey
if i could level specialization at the rate i could with the old patrol grind or now qued content, with PVP, i would actually consider coming back
Well first off, thanks for communicating with us on this.... Now I like most of these changes and honestly can't complain too loudly about a 30min lockout on patrols, tho I personally dislike em I see the intent to get people out of their parking garages around argala. My one critique of this change is that now we have more ways to get dilithium as a side effect of our normal play(YAY! GOOD!) but we now have ever increasing piles of unrefined dilithium sitting there frustrating us, useless for our fleet projects, rep projects or anything else we need dil for... can we get a bump there? nothing too huge but like 10k/day?
More XP is always good, but personally my play style has never been one to rush to the next level ASAP.
PvE queues:
A MASSIVE increase of 120 dil, so in other words, no significant change to the price of dil equipment. Atlernatively, almost 1 zen... until the prices go up accordingly... in about 5 mins, which basically means those of us on the dil exchange make slightly less per day as you can still only refine 8k per day/spend slightly more IRL money for dil.
Sector patrols:
1. See above.
2. *Delta patrols xp nerfed... You did WHAT?!? Rewarding too much? You mean the Delta stuff added stupid level gap, delta patrols rewarded not nearly enough xp, so you nerfed the xp rewards?... WHAT?!? O.o
3. Meh, whatever.
4. See three.
Adventure/battle zones:
We're making a token effort to make Borg grind relevant again.
Missions:
Slightly faster to get dil gear/another boost to dil exchange prices.
* So they're acting on player feedback? WHO'S FEEDBACK WAS THIS? :mad:
I'm not THAT difficult to please, I just have a very low tolerance threshold for stupid BS! - George Carlin.
I think you need to take vBulletin out back and shoot it. :P
Seriously, though...I think I will need to see the XP in action to tell if that's any good, though the dilithium supply increase sounds promising. (You MIGHT also see a reduction in goldspammers if you are able to inject more dil into the market, BTW...less incentive for people to use them.) I'm also not sure how this will impact the EC situation, since as far as I'm aware EC still remains nerfed, and not being able to cycle certain missions as quickly could cut into what little we have.
Has there been any thought to addressing the short EC supply?
Either way, thanks for at least letting us know what's coming down the pipeline.
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So now it will take even LONGER to level (and get the Romulan mark daily 100), and we can't even do it with the patrols we actually like, we have to do all the ****ty ones we HATE?
HOW THE **** COULD YOU POSSIBLY THINK THIS IS AN IMPROVEMENT?!?!?!?
Are you insane? We complain about how long it takes to level and how unfun the Delta patrols are and you do THIS in response? Do you WANT to drive players away? Are you purposefully tanking STO? That's what you're doing, driving players away. First the T6 nonsense, and all the stupid imbalances, then the ludicrously long spec grind, and now you **** that grind even further.
Whoever made this decision needs to be fired. Immediately. This is the worst decision I've seen in any MMO since the damned NGE. Yeah I ****ing went there.
Its like you don't want people to actually play the game. The whole damned game is waiting for cooldowns now. Doffs, R&D, Reputation, all the dailies, queue cooldowns and now regular levelling cooldowns. Wtf do you expect us to actually DO? Why can't we pick content we LIKE and keep doing it?
The iconians did it... they are gangster like that.
As far as what he was saying about a time currency I agree with that to an extent. It seems that everything is only geared to that aspect which results in players feeling like its just one big giant grind between dilithium, reputations, now the specialization(another game I play has been working on one for a while now which is more alt friendly where its account wide and not per character), and then event grinds to top that off.
Now I will say that one of the thing the game really lacks is that its imo its just a dungeon based game. Where you would have pvp, pvpve, raids/world bosses(kind of with adventure zones but doesn't feel quite right), and story based stuff immersion I guess what I am trying to say is all of that kind of stuff where you login and have to think about what you plan on doing vs the same old grind. Now I know its possible because that one new event/mission with wintersday it was designed for fun it gave rewards but it wasn't much because it was designed on having fun rather than rewards.
At this point though the best reward I could hope to get out of STO is if for example something designed more for fun like some kind of raiding mission kind of like the Klingon side mission where you raid mars lol. Plus some more emphasis on raiders actually having something to raid and some love on developing bops more since its kind of our KDF area where federation has lots of science ships which is okay and understandable but for the part with KDF has to have some purpose which I would assume would only be in the delta quadrant because of the happy alpha quadrant family with little cardassian kids getting 10 cents a day and such.
Use alts.
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Aww, I wanted to make that reference.
I will say though, these changes are a disappointment. Appreciated to some degree yes, but a disappointment. I see it more as 'Ok, we got the metrics for all the DR content, Winter Event, and Anniversary Event, so let's nerf Delta Quadrant stuff to some degree that people have done a ton of, and get them back into other content.'
I don't even really care about nerfing of the patrols in the DQ. I despised the patrols with a passion anyways, so I have no love lost about them.
Take putting all normal queues to give 480 dil. They have given 360 for a long time, but used to be 480 in the past. I don't consider that 'increasing it', I consider that 'undoing a previous nerf'. Hence why I also thought of the reference to 1984.
To give at least a little positive thought to this post: At least next week when the CE event is running, I'll get decent levels of xp out of it.
Here's a request:
You said all the queued missions are having their xp increased, possibly up to three times more. Which is fine, but my request is...tell us how much for each specific queue.
Don't even need to say all of them, just some, like Borg STFs, the CE, or other popular queues. Give people an understanding of how much of an improvement they will be seeing, instead of keeping everything hidden.