My Delta Recruitment Feedback

ironchefbbq

The messaging around Delta Recruits in game is a bit lacking.

The entire first eight days no one could describe what the progression meter meant (or how it benefitted the player base) without referencing some external source. In the few days leading up to the first deadline over a few channels (public & private) I witnessed a handful of people every hour express confusion about the progression meter because they didn't understand that it was a server-wide meter instead of a character/account specific meter. Even more people do not understand what benefit the player base gained by reaching Tier 2 (or how long the benefit lasts). There is a general sense that people do not understand where or when leveling their Delta Recruit stopped impacting the progression meter during the first week.

I am a little disappointed by the DR progression meter getting reset and repurposed after the first week. I understand that you need to keep dangling the carrot, but not everyone pounds away at breakneck speed to fill bars. When I logged off Wednesday night the meter was around 75% full. I know that we didn't reach Tier 2, but I didn't know that the progress would get truncated. I can live with only getting two tiers of whatever nebulous benefit. Somewhere around the time we reached Tier 1 on the first week a few people in the chat channels made comments to the effect of "The Devs did not expect the players to reach Tier 1 so fast". I have no idea if that statement is accurate, but it seemed to make people feel like they were exceeding expectations. I understand that it can be easier to manage hard breakpoints, but when you get so close to reaching Tier 3 and all of that effort gets chucked into the void it does not generate a warm fuzzy feeling. I am curious to find out what Cryptic would have done if the player base didn't fill the bar to even reach Tier 1.


When I first heard about Delta Recruits I was unsure if I wanted to level an alt at all. I had five characters (a main at 60, a fresh 60 alt and three mid 50s alts that will never see a full spec tree) and no desire to grind all of them. Since December I have been close to dropping this game for good and never looking back (on more than one occasion). I was considering maybe converting enough dilithium to zen so I could make a minimum purchase to expand my roster to create a Delta Recruit alt, but the conversion rates had me on the fence a bit. I was really just considering saving my dilithium to expend on applying technology upgrades to unbound gear to give to friends or my fleet. The day or two before the Delta Recruit event went live the notification in the game launcher said we would be getting a free character slot, so the sealed the deal for me.

I hurried to make a full set (ground and space) Mk II gear and apply an upgrade to all of it. I did not know that we would be getting (relatively good) free gear at each 10 level increment. I had fun running through the first few episodes, so I decided I would eventually complete all of the episodes (especially since I have never done so on any of my characters). The DR rewards interface successfully lured me in and I noticed that there were rewards for doing R&D, so I decided to make an honest effort to round out the character a bit. Once the Duty Officer interface opened up I transferred over a bunch of DOs to jumpstart the process of generating CXP and getting the Colonization chains rolling. By the end of the first week I had a R&D school above level 5 and reached 5/7 on a couple Colonization chains.

Now that the focus has shifted away from running Episodes I feel slightly less urgency to continue playing episodes as hard as I was (which wasn't too hard since I took the time to do doffing). The OCD part of my personality wants to keep hammering at Doffing to push the meter forward even though I do not really understand the metrics of how (since the meter is scaled to the entire population and not just me) it works. I have a similar quandry now as I did last week. Should I just play the Episodes (so I see all of the content), hammer out the remainder of the Delta Recruit rewards and ignore the nebulous progression meter (especially since any excess effort gets punted)? Or should I just hammer the Doffing as hard as possible on my Delta Recruit (to push the meter forward) and go back to playing my main to take advantage of some sort of XP boost? I feel less inclined to push the meter forward for the sake of just pushing it. The general rumblings that I have heard over the first day of week two have not been too positive since pushing the meter forward is linked to something that is not at the core of the play experience.


The Delta Recruit rewards interface layout is simple and gets the point across easily. Do X and get Y. The X is pretty straight forward. The Y has been pretty surprising so far (my DR is only level 45 and has completed four episodes iirc). I have seen people link the endgame goodies and that is more than enough reason to finish things.

The Progression Meter and the associated rewards have not been communicated properly. I am still not 100% sure what benefit we gained by reaching Tier 2. I haven't noticed a buff icon indicating that we get a bonus. I haven't seen any notification saying "Hey dummy, look here. See this icon/buff bar/bonus pool/whatever? That is what you earned for reaching Tier 2 last week. Take a look at what you can do during week 2." to clearly let the players know what is going on.


Edit: I am not confused in any way as to what benefit we gained by reaching Tier 2. What I am trying to say is that the ingame cues as to what was earned were poorly designed. Having to look at an external source to find out what is going on inside the game is not ideal.

morden613

I agree with the OP.

ummax

I kinda enjoy the event

for the confusion .. just glossing over the meter with a mouse and reading the tooltip explanation alleviated my momentary "what does this mean" question. The meter was not reset to 0 the first week we worked on xp gain for the following week. This week were are working on the R & D bonus for the following week.

The rest is also quite clear to me and I had zero issues with it lol. Perhaps they could have sent an ingame email but the information is on the front of the game launcher in the form of a giant clicky panel and that panel is again present ingame on the missions intro page when you open it up

I think that aside from sending a mass ingame email to further explain there is not much else they could have done.

drakethewhite

I agree with the OP about the lack of a 'buff' icon to indicated the weekly Tier II reward we completed. First thing I looked for on logging in last night.

I don't agree with the rest and will call out the rather poor Account wide rewards which only slightly exceed a normal event such as CE in exchange for a lot more work.

bobbydazlers

I suggest you read through all the news items regarding delta recruits every aspect of the event is clearly and plainly explained there including how the progression meter works and what we get for it.
I don't know why you would expect any indication you are getting the rewards from filling progression there is never an buff icon when they do a dilithium weekend or a marks weekend or an xp weekend, why should there be one now?
you should know you are getting the reward for filling the progression meter without a buff icon because it says so in the news items regarding this event just as it is when they do an xp weekend.

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ironchefbbq

bobbydazlers wrote: »

I don't know why you would expect any indication you are getting the rewards from filling progression there is never an buff icon when they do a dilithium weekend or a marks weekend or an xp weekend, why should there be one now?
you should know you are getting the reward for filling the progression meter without a buff icon because it says so in the news items regarding this event just as it is when they do an xp weekend.

This DR event is being handled differently than a static Bonus XP Weekend event that is scheduled in the calendar. The standard calendar events have a clickable range that give general information. The information dialog that pops up has some general information about the event. The Dilithium event mentions that you get bonus dilithium for doing almost anything. You can figure out the payout and it has been standardized through multiple repeats. The player base knows what to expect.

The DR Bonus for week one does not have a calendar entry. The bonuses are scaled by player participation. It only has a spotlight in the "This Weekend" portion of the Overview tab. And the little scrollable window with the About text only mentions that there is a bonus. There is no specific information about reaching Tier 2 or what that implies.

I can figure out the specifics if I go external from the game to hunt down news posts. What I am trying to say is that the transition from Week 1 to Week 2 is being handled poorly. There is no notification in game saying that we completed Tier 2 last week. Like I said originally, I logged off the night before not knowing if we reached Tier 3. I could figure out our status for the entire week because there was a progress bar there for an entire week. Then after the update rolls out that old bar is gone and a new one is in its place. There was no placeholder icon or indicator to inform the players that they failed to reach Tier 3 (I had to figure that out by looking at the forums). Not everyone was online right up to the point where they shutdown the servers for maintenance and roll out the update, so the status of week 1 was left unknown.

bobtheskull99

I thought what the meter represented was indicated pretty clearly, I can't understand why so many ppl were confused over this

davefenestrator

I thought the meter was clear enough.

I also pretty much ignored it, aside from noticing our progress as a group. I play for fun, so I leveled my DR recruit at my own pace. I'm not going to push myself to play extra if I don't feel like playing.

It's a game. Do what you enjoy doing, don't stress so much about whether you get 100% bonus XP vs. 150% bonus.

bobbydazlers

ironchefbbq wrote: »

This DR event is being handled differently than a static Bonus XP Weekend event that is scheduled in the calendar. The standard calendar events have a clickable range that give general information. The information dialog that pops up has some general information about the event. The Dilithium event mentions that you get bonus dilithium for doing almost anything. You can figure out the payout and it has been standardized through multiple repeats. The player base knows what to expect.

The DR Bonus for week one does not have a calendar entry. The bonuses are scaled by player participation. It only has a spotlight in the "This Weekend" portion of the Overview tab. And the little scrollable window with the About text only mentions that there is a bonus. There is no specific information about reaching Tier 2 or what that implies.

I can figure out the specifics if I go external from the game to hunt down news posts. What I am trying to say is that the transition from Week 1 to Week 2 is being handled poorly. There is no notification in game saying that we completed Tier 2 last week. Like I said originally, I logged off the night before not knowing if we reached Tier 3. I could figure out our status for the entire week because there was a progress bar there for an entire week. Then after the update rolls out that old bar is gone and a new one is in its place. There was no placeholder icon or indicator to inform the players that they failed to reach Tier 3 (I had to figure that out by looking at the forums). Not everyone was online right up to the point where they shutdown the servers for maintenance and roll out the update, so the status of week 1 was left unknown.

I really cant see what the difference is, in an xp weekend you get bonus xp for everything you usually do, you might play a little harder to get as much bonus xp as you can but that's about it, you know whatever you do that pays xp will give the bonus.

during this week till Thursday after the update you will get 100% bonus xp for everything you usually do, you might play a little harder to get as much bonus xp as you can but that's about it, you know whatever you do that pays xp will give the bonus.

whats to figure you get 50% for tier1 and 50% for tier2, you get nothing for tier3 as that was not completed, now this week is for bonus doff marks tier1 will give 15% bonus doff marks starting after the update Thursday.
when you open up your doff interface you can see the levels for each category of doffing, if you reach 100k in a category you attain T4 in that and any marks over 100k can be traded for fleet marks at your fleet starbase.

davefenestrator wrote: »

I thought the meter was clear enough.

I also pretty much ignored it, aside from noticing our progress as a group. I play for fun, so I leveled my DR recruit at my own pace. I'm not going to push myself to play extra if I don't feel like playing.

It's a game. Do what you enjoy doing, don't stress so much about whether you get 100% bonus XP vs. 150% bonus.

and this also.

if players cant be bothered to check for news items and look at the forum to find out where they stand then it cant much matter to them.
at the end of the day the bonuses are inconsequential to me I do what I do and that's that, if I happen to get any bonuses along the way publicised or not that's great, if I don't it don't matter.
I don't need an icon to tell me I`m getting a bonus, I can tell strait away when I get more for doing today that which I did yesterday and I can tell by how much more it is whether the bonus is 2% or 200%.
if I do something that normally pays 50xp and its 100xp I know I got 100% bonus if it pays 125xp I know I have 150% bonus its simple, the same would apply to any amount of xp you care to mention, it doesn't take Einstein to work out a simple percentage calculation, especially as we were preinformed how much each tier would pay.