Advanced PVE Queue Changes

pwlaughingtrendy

Advanced Difficulty PVE Queues will be getting some new changes, starting with our Azure Nebula Rescue!

You can find some of the changes in our dev blog found here.

~LaughingTrendy

mhall85

Oh, if this makes earning BNPs and APCs easier... YES PLEASE.

I don't play ANR, though, so it would be nice if this was tested in something like ISA.

birzark

I am happy this is being looked at and being normalized across the board for the ques. Hopefully help encourage more ques to pop.

karr007

That actually sounds surprisingly reasonable. And thanks god for removing the fail optionals, that may be the right step for returning the public ques. One can only hope.

lucho80

How about removing dumb "rewards caps" on everything in the game that is point based?

Epohh hunt
Dilithium mining
etc....

gulberat

pwlaughingtrendy wrote: »

Advanced Difficulty PVE Queues will be getting some new changes, starting with our Azure Nebula Rescue!

You can find some of the changes in our dev blog found here.

~LaughingTrendy

Fewer fail conditions? Now THIS has potential. I hope this hits Tribble soon so people can try it out.

The rewards boost on Normal is something I hope will be meaningful too, as (for example) I have been trying to train on the Bug Hunt map for a few weeks and only got ONE Normal queue to pop in that time. Especially as it currently is I did not want to do training runs on Advanced--yet I almost cannot train as it is.

captaind3

Having read the blog, I see the thought process.

This looks good. Look forward to testing it out.

For something like Khitomer Space, it should be pretty simple the original optional was pretty straightforward and directly related to the mission, we're stopping the Borg from traveling back in time and changing the past. So make sure no Borg Probes can travel to the past. So inline with these changes, you would start with a basic bonus marks pool, that would get deleted from the more probes travel back, and then you would fail the mission if ten get through.

But the case of making sure that the optionals don't fail the mission. Bravo.

Glad you guys are taking your time and thinking this through.

So I'll give a preemptive good work.

drreverend

Interesting. I've always liked Azure Nebula as it's pretty straight forward but requires a bit of strategy to be good at, but found the rewards a bit anemic in the past. This looks like a step in the right direction.

Timers are fine if they're rewarding rather than punishing teams that aren't DPS monsters, or just the general "Don't AFK in the STF."

A thing I'm curious about is the rewards, as for many people the R&D material reward matters as much as the marks, if not more so. Will these be seeing an adjustment with the tweaks here?

reynoldsxd

err.... you know.. 10 points.... please make sure the spawning code does not continuously spew out the 1 point bops... because i have had too many of those runs. One bop after the other....

mustrumridcully0

I have no real idea how many marks are usually given out by these missions - to be honest, I usually just hope for the Daily Bonus and that's it. I wonder how the final tally will differ?


But changing the optionals to be optionals again and having only a much easier failure condition should really improve getting the ability to get Elite Marks like Ancient Power Cells.
Of course - Azura Nebula Rescue is not granting any of those, so I hope some of the Delta Queues are next on the agenda.

drake122svk

Honestly, the reason I only ever play a select few PVE queues is not the difficulty, but the fact that most of them are horribly time gated TRIBBLE...

toiva

So optionals won't be mandatory soon (TM), but the base rewards are lowered to normal if you don't achieve them.

Well less failures is good, as for how the mark part ends up working, I'll leave that out to more experienced and knowledgeable people. I'm kinda fearing it'll on average mean less marks for many people, but I may be wrong.

rosetyler51

Wow. I did not know my raps came from the future

rosetyler51 wrote: »

I got to wonder just a little bit if I worked out I could be the ****?
Or maybe I'll just make a meme about how others are acting just like pricks.
The second one will do.
Because it's true.
I should not have to step up my game.
Bring it down my level, dude.
I should not rally my friends.
I should not push myself until I win.
When the Year of Hell comes I should not rise up.
I should just be able to press "I WIN".
There should be no thing.
Known as No Win
GIVE ME THE MEDALS NOW!
OR I QUIT!
PUTTING IN EFFORT TO BE THE BEST!?!?!
IT DON'T MEAN ****!

sheldonlcooper

This is the change for advanced that I have been waiting for since October, and which I had given up hope on seeing. All I can say is thank you and let's get back into those queues!

risian4

This brings us to our final major planned change and perhaps the most important – Advanced difficulty PvE queues will no longer fail for not completing the mission objectives that had previously been optional on Normal difficulty.

This is probably the best change I've seen in the past couple of weeks. I don't play Azure nebula much, but if this change is made to all queues, it would be a huge improvement

lan451

Whoa hold up. Releasing a single mission as a test bed and then waiting for player feedback before making tweaks and then ultimately rolling out the changes on a wider scale? Who are you people and what have you done with Cryptic?

Jokes aside, this is a very good thing. You should do more things like this.

captfabulous

Sounds promising. I hope the implementation actually solves the problem of constant failures and the resulting inability to obtain elite marks for casual players and PUGs.

Another suggestion -- eliminate the cooldown timer if a queue fails. It's bad enough when you get a failure and all your time and energy is wasted (yeah, I'm looking at you 3rd wave of Borg Disconnected) but to then be locked out from trying again for 30-60 mins is pouring salt in the wound. Eliminate the timer so we can just go in immediately and try again.

gulberat

I meant to add, if this goes into effect as described, I will actually consider doing Advanced space STF's again. Fails on Elite, I can understand. But this will bring the Advanced queues back to being what was advertised when DR was yet to be dropped. I am glad that the original advertised promise is (hopefully) soon to be finally delivered. This will address one of my three biggest DR grievances--the other two being crafting costs and lack of sufficient storyline content for a continuous 50-60 experience, compounded by XP nerfing.

evilmark444

Yay! Alright! Woohoo! Seriously this is great news, making failure a high probability was an absolutely terrible design decision.

warpangel

OK...but before you spread this to other queues, please make Elites for all the queues that are still missing them, for those of us who don't want to automatically win just by showing up.

commodoreobvious

These are good changes and I like them.

captfabulous

toiva wrote: »

So optionals won't be mandatory soon (TM), but the base rewards are lowered to normal if you don't achieve them.

Well less failures is good, as for how the mark part ends up working, I'll leave that out to more experienced and knowledgeable people. I'm kinda fearing it'll on average mean less marks for many people, but I may be wrong.

While I'm sure there are those that do advanced for the extra marks I dare say that most do them for the elite marks like Borg Neural Processors, etc. As is often the case due to the increased difficulty level one typically can get more marks doing normal than they can doing advanced.

sisteric

I think this is a good and appropriate change to that specific queue. I applaud and approve these changes and look forward to trying it out for the sake of seeing how well it is implemented. I expect these changes to be the model for all the other Advanced queues in the game. And I think this will help make those queues to be busier.

starwolf314

Yes, yes, yes! This sounds like a good step in the right direction! Thank you!

[Deleted User]

About time PVE's got some tweaking. Trying to PUG some of them is just beyond terrible.

mhall85

captaind3 wrote: »

For something like Khitomer Space, it should be pretty simple the original optional was pretty straightforward and directly related to the mission, we're stopping the Borg from traveling back in time and changing the past. So make sure no Borg Probes can travel to the past. So inline with these changes, you would start with a basic bonus marks pool, that would get deleted from the more probes travel back, and then you would fail the mission if ten get through.

Khitomer Space has never bothered me, though, even after the changes... as you said, stopping any Borg probe makes sense from a story perspective. My issue with this STF (now, especially) is that it takes time to complete. I played it a week or so ago... me and another ship were camped out at the left gate, picking off probes before they hit the time portal. I got SO BORED, though, that I finally flew over to one of the transformers (at like 8% or so), and finished it off... and we lost, LOL. I just think the team was underpowered.

In ISA, though... few PUGers seem to understand that you CAN'T IGNORE THE SPHERES ANYMORE. I'm even okay with this staying in... but, people don't seem to get it, so it's SO MADDENING when you fail. That is where these changes will be nice. I won't get punished for other people not reading. :P

john98837

Optional Mission Step 1: Rescue 10 points Worth of Ships in 5 Minutes.
This step will start shortly after the mission begins and will replace the current optional step of rescuing 3 ships in 3 minutes.
Completing this optional mission step is worth 5 marks in Normal difficulty and 10 marks in Advanced difficulty.
Optional Mission Step 2: Rescue 10 points worth of Ship in 4 Minutes.
This step will start approximately half-way through the mission.
Completing this optional mission step is worth 5 marks in Normal difficulty and 10 marks in Advanced difficulty.

One serious problem I see with both of these, especially #2. The randomness of spawns can doom even the best teams on this. One of the most annoying things about azura is when all it wants to spawn are 1s or 2s. On the 4 minute timer if it spawns a set of 4 1 point ships at the start your pretty much screwed. Takes about 30 second to kill the ships, 30 seconds to free, then 2 minutes of waiting for another spawn. At that point your at 3 minutes with only 4 points, if your lucky you may get to free another wave of spawns before the 4 min runs out, but probably not, and those could be all 1s as well.

The 5 minute timer is a bit more plausible if you don't get 2 waves of all 1s which does happen quite frequently. I would suggest leaving either leaving it as number of ships saved or doing something about the spawn patterns on azura to insure we always at least have the opportunity to save enough points worth of ships in the time frame allotted.

ceekayzero

I am a little confused by this Blog in one respect: Is the ONLY change happening tomorrow going to be a reworking of ANRA; or will *all* the advanced mandatory objections be switched over to optionals?

I.E. After maintenance tomorrow, will I be able to get a Craylon Gas in DRSA even if we don't rescue all 6 engineers; or will I still be able to get a BNP if a transformer gets healed in ISA?

dragonsbrethren

While I think this is a good change for the health of the game, it saddens me that it's needed at all. It wasn't hard to not fail the required objectives on Advanced. No exceptional build or strategy was needed -- Azure is one example where simple strategization really mattered, though. The game simply doesn't educate the average player enough to do it without consulting external resources. That is what really needs to change. I want to see every player doing well, not objectives being changed so they can win by doing poorly.

Still, this was needed. No one wants to hear "it's your build that's the problem", no matter how true, and revitalizing the queues is only a good thing.

lantis

Here here to the death of pugs, cause everyone including people who shouldn't will be running adv cause they aren't punished for not being able to do adv while getting the same rewards as normal when you do fail it TRIBBLE over those who actually can.

gulberat

warpangel wrote: »

OK...but before you spread this to other queues, please make Elites for all the queues that are still missing them, for those of us who don't want to automatically win just by showing up.

Even if I will likely never be competitive for the majority of them, I can support this. AS LONG AS the performance of a few outlier players is never again used to TRIBBLE people over on Normal and Advanced.