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Advanced queue insta-fails being removed! (Azure Rescue first)
davefenestrator
Member Posts: 10,652 Arc User
It looks like Cryptic is listening to the complaints about advanced queues having the optionals being non-optional:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/9111543-advanced-difficulty-pve-queue-changes
Optionals will be optional again, and timers for the overall run will only be restrictive enough to prevent AFK, bots, etc. (timers will still be in place for optional rewards).
This should be a help for new players, PUGs, and people grinding for crafting mats.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/9111543-advanced-difficulty-pve-queue-changes
To this end we are going to be trying a new system for the progression of PvE queue difficulty. As of this Thursday, March 26, the Azure Nebula Rescue (Advanced) PvE queue will be updated to reflect this new systemic change and if everything about it is well received we will be rolling out similar changes to the rest of our PvE queues. ...
Optionals will be optional again, and timers for the overall run will only be restrictive enough to prevent AFK, bots, etc. (timers will still be in place for optional rewards).
This should be a help for new players, PUGs, and people grinding for crafting mats.
Post edited by davefenestrator on
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Good news everyone! You are now reading this post in my voice!
That's clearly an Undine imposter. Farnsworth says "Good news, everyone!", not "great news".
What's my position?
That people should know what they're screaming about!
(paraphrased from "The Newsroom)
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.
just like in STO!
If the Undine weren't so obsessed with getting rid of weakness I'd suspect the devs were replaced by them.
Brain slug or hypnotoad, all glory to what ever entity brought this about.
The BNPs are the biggest issue I think... because we'll still have people with underrated gear and under rated skills trying to get into Advanced just to get their BNPs... and causing e-peen rage because they caused some poor nerd to lose their optionals... and because the noob/newb doesn't know how else to get their BNPs.
Well I'd prefer "zerging" through Advanced Pugs for BNPs ... than Insta-Fails & or empty Queues/Pugs ... people raging about Optionals being lost will always be around, and if they really care about it they don't have to Pug ...
Much welcomed change and hopefully you will go through and do this for ALL ADV queues, and not just start then think sod it and abandon the idea.
Hopefully can help breathe life back into the affected missions numbers playing wise.
But i gotta ask, this has been a problem, muchly talked about on the forums, usually in a negative light, since Delta Rising was released. So why has it taken what...6(?) months ish to come to this conclusion?.
Still, again, thanks for doing this, for me at least, much appreciated.
I will, however, reserve my final opinion for after this goes live and I see if it works as advertised, if so...
There will be 'Woo Hoo!'s
I used to enjoy Infected Conduit (old) Elite. I always pugged it, never premade. I might start to actually enjoy (and do) Infected Conduit Advanced now that I don't have to worry about someone popping a generator on the other side costing me a half hour cooldown.
My Delta Recruit might actually get more than 10 BNP worth of Omega gear now, or even some APC gear.
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.
seriously is the best move cryptic has made in a long time
Thanks Charles Grey
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
No, it doesn't, because people couldn't even learn in the first place.
Now, they won't have to learn anything all over again!!!
More brain dead player's, getting by on a nerfed down coloring book missions.
Here's a crayon all, don't go coloring outside the lines!
:mad:
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
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.
You now really... you should go find something better to do you're taking this way to seriously.
I have yet to see you ever say anything good about this game and your fellow players. I'd assume you're a troll but generally you put out good points whether I agree with you or not.
But I do think you occassionally need to take a step back and breath a bit on this one. Even if you're right and people won't learn... this'll help you with your pugs and completing the advanced pugs. Otherwise... don't pug... but how exactly is this a bad thing...
Just because you're e-peen is the size of the empire state building... no one really is all that impressed.
'Sometime's apo'strophe abu'se work's out for the better.
It's not about greatest challenge.
Normal -> Advanced -> Elite
...not...
Normal -> Normal -> Elite
Some people don't want Elite - they wanted something between Normal and Elite. Which was where adding in Advanced and then creating the Elite for those other folks was a good thing.
Folks wanting no challenge could do Normal.
Folks wanting some challenge could do Advanced.
Folks wanting more challenge could do Elite.
The game provided for different players.
This is a step backward.
If somebody didn't feel up to Elite but wanted more than Normal...they're being shown the door.
So TRIBBLE Cryptic and TRIBBLE all the folks that wanted this.
I seriously doubt you can force people to "learn", in a Videogame ... there will always be the ones who want to learn & those who don't ... the 2nd Group might be bigger, especially in PUGs, but they'll most likely just stop pugging instead of "learn" -> leading to Dead Queues ...
Normal=Small significance to optionals, weak opponents (good training map)
Advanced=Greater significance to optionals, stronger opponents (should work for the average player once they get geared and trained)
Elite=Autofails, toughest opponents (the weak will perish, only the strong need apply)
I see a reasonable progression here, and I say this as someone who will only ever be competitive in a very few limited Ground elites I am specifically trained and geared for (currently UIE and my goal is to also be ready for BHE. If I can get the danged Normal map to pop more than the one time so I can *actually train properly.*)
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.
I don't want a step back... but we needed to do something to fix the learning gap between normal and advanced. This was a good way to do it I think.
It doesn't fully fix the situation.. .and like you said it can cause it to become brain dead easy... but it's a good first step. Now I'm waiting to see how else they intend to fix the situation and rebalance the queues.
Let me put it this way... if they put the optionals back in on advanced... then tweak it a bit in difficulty in other ways... say tie BNPs in with the optionals instead of the end game reward... I'm all for it.
People would still get marks for completing the situation... but their precious BNPs would be optional locked. Place it so completing both optionals in normal gives you 1 bnp... and 3 BNPS in Advanced for both options (numbers are arbitrary obviously) and you bring it back up.
Keep the difficulty of the ships (hps etc) higher in Advanced... and you're kind of a null wash.
BNPs become optional... can be gotten.. .slowly from normal... and the difficulty remains high.
I'm willing to wait to see how else this flows... they did say this was a first step... not a finished product.
A second grader could understand what happened to the queues, yet for some reason it completely evades the slightest comprehension from a bunch of folks on the forums here.
Why does somebody have to hit up a queue?
Elite Marks? Nope...even the slow one, the APCs, you're looking at two weeks to have all the APCs you'll need for all the Delta gear. That's the slow one...and that's without hitting a single queue.
Regular Marks? Daily Reward Boxes...not only provide enough to cover the Daily Projects but will start building up a surplus. Odds are they'd have kept adding the Regular Marks to related content as well - so it would have been even easier to get them.
Dil? Dil is all over the place. There are countless threads from folks asking for an increase in the refine cap because Dil is that freaking easy to get in the game.
Crafting Mats? Yeah, one can tell by the prices on the Exchange that those are in a short supply...not.
There is no reason to hit up the queues unless you want to do so...
...and that gets into folks not wanting to hit up the queues with folks that aren't ready for them, eh? So those folks head off to various channels - whether it's higher DPS or even low DPS - where folks just want to play with somebody that's made the least bit of effort to be there, isn't afking, isn't trolling, etc.
What about just some ordinary stuff, eh? Maybe somebody just doesn't enjoy that particular content? Folks have gotten what they thought they might have needed from it already? Maybe they're just doing other things, yeah?
There are all sorts of reasons for the public facing queues to look the way they do while all sorts of channels are going 24/7 running all sorts of stuff.
Folks picking one reason and ignoring all the rest...it's just a Vo'Quv full of /facepalm.
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
Actually... not ture. The NPCs will still be lv 60. They're just adjusting the objectives. Many of the "Mandatory Optionals" were set too high for a lot of people. Advanced isn't "Some" challenge. Its "Climb this pole with weights on your arms and no hand holds". Elite is SUPPOSED to challenge the best of the best. Advanced is not supposed to do that. Its supposed to be doable with even Mk XII gear. Right now... not so much.
For example: Azure Nebula.
"Rescue 3 ships in 3 minutes"
That means you're scrambling right off the bat, and you HAVE to go after 3 ships at once, meaning at least one person will have to solo a ship. And I've struggled in Mk XII gear to even fight a group of Tholians around a Dehlan on advanced because they're HP sponges.
Some of these objectives are just plain ridiculus for a PUG to manage. Yes sometimes you get lucky and have a decent team, but other times... you might get a bad team that can't even handle a Haa'pax group without the entire team there.
I'm a decent player, and I used to be pretty powerful before all the DR changes to the queues.
They advertised that Advanced would be comparable to the old Elite. The only time that is true is if you've actually upgraded everything to Mk XIV already, and maybe do a premade group.
The way I see it, these changes they wanna field test on Azure Nebula is a step in the right direction in getting Advanced to feel more like the Old Elite. Actually doable with a PUG.
The problem is... that Cryptic doesn't tell people that there are other ways... but they constantly tell people how to get them via queues.... because queues are all that matter to their metrics... if that's not obvious.
There is a learning issue... where people learn how to complete normals... go to advanced but cause advanced to constantly fail due to optionals being no longer optional and the requirements to complete the now new mandatories are different then what they were on normal.
So basically even if you learn everything you can about the normal version currently... it's no guarentee you're going to be able to do the advanced version... because of different requirements... leading to mass failures... leading to nerd rage and e-peen beatings.
This normalizes the learning curve... you learn the skills and requirements on normal... then go to advanced and just have harder ships... but the same learning curve... making normal exactly what normal is supposed to be for... learning the system until you're ready for Advanced... and those that don't want to learn... stay in normal.
Thing is...hit up that rare group that fails (I'm probably down to a 5-7% failure rate on my Advanced queues at this point) and it tends to be a pretty quick failure, right?
That failure rate that's dropped? Why? Because folks actually put a little bit of effort into getting better. At the start of the year, it was closer to 25-30%. People have learned. They've seen that the queue failed. They went to find out why. They went to find out what they could to do to avoid that. Cause there is so much information out there to help everybody from the newest player to the somebody on the cusp of trying to get into the top ten out there. This is an extremely helpful community. Folks were taking advanced of that - and - things have just been getting better and better there.
So now the potentially quick failure is gone...how will the person know that the queue isn't running just the way it's meant to run? It's like the folks that have complained about missions taking 30-45 minutes long...because they never really got any feedback that anything was wrong, meanwhile other folks were doing them in 5-10 minutes. They came to the forums - they got help - no more 30-45 minute missions for them....wheee, excellent!
So how long are folks going to be held hostage in Advanced queues now as folks that have no desire to learn anything (or they would have by now) just go around chasing butterflies?
Why on Earth would Cryptic think this was a good move and would bring back folks to the public queues? The channel runs started up and the public queues started dying off long before Delta Rising came along...and guess how they were? Like what they're doing...it's /facepalmcity.