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alex284
Member Posts: 366 Arc User
I really liked ANRA post-DR, the way it was with the "Free 3 ships in 3 minutes" mandatory objective. It was exciting and fun and if your team couldn't do it, well, you only wasted 3 minutes. I was succeeding in about 3/4 of pugs and always with pre-mades.
Then it got dumbed down and I stayed away for a while, but the amount of complaining I kept seeing in-game about ANRA sent me back into it to see what was wrong.
I've done it a few times these past 2 days and I noticed that not one Romulan ship got freed if I wasn't there to free it (in pugs). Every other player in the pug stayed glued to me, following me around. We never got the optional because, of course, one person can't do the optional by themselves, even if they have four t5/6 ships following them around like carrier pets.
I also did it once with a premade and we got the optionals just fine, even with huge amounts of lag.
I guess a bunch of players who aren't at all ready for advanced content are now signing up for ANRA to get argonite, because now you can just sort of float around for 12 minutes and get argonite as a participation award. No one uses chat in ANRA pugs like they did before. No one separates from the group to meet the objectives faster. And considering that I have to do 2 or 3 tractor beams sometimes even though the entire team is right there, not everyone is even learning the basic premise of the mission before doing advanced.
So to the people who said that taking away the mandatory objectives would make people learn the mission: HA!
And to the people who said that dumbing ANRA down would increase teamwork: HA!
And to the players who said the mission would be more fun if you would get an award just for showing up: HA!
ANRA is just being used for farming now. It'd be nice to have an elite version, just for kicks, because I don't care for farming and I was playing this mission for fun before. Even if I had some terrible pug-mates, those pug-mates were trying and effort is appreciated.
Then it got dumbed down and I stayed away for a while, but the amount of complaining I kept seeing in-game about ANRA sent me back into it to see what was wrong.
I've done it a few times these past 2 days and I noticed that not one Romulan ship got freed if I wasn't there to free it (in pugs). Every other player in the pug stayed glued to me, following me around. We never got the optional because, of course, one person can't do the optional by themselves, even if they have four t5/6 ships following them around like carrier pets.
I also did it once with a premade and we got the optionals just fine, even with huge amounts of lag.
I guess a bunch of players who aren't at all ready for advanced content are now signing up for ANRA to get argonite, because now you can just sort of float around for 12 minutes and get argonite as a participation award. No one uses chat in ANRA pugs like they did before. No one separates from the group to meet the objectives faster. And considering that I have to do 2 or 3 tractor beams sometimes even though the entire team is right there, not everyone is even learning the basic premise of the mission before doing advanced.
So to the people who said that taking away the mandatory objectives would make people learn the mission: HA!
And to the people who said that dumbing ANRA down would increase teamwork: HA!
And to the players who said the mission would be more fun if you would get an award just for showing up: HA!
ANRA is just being used for farming now. It'd be nice to have an elite version, just for kicks, because I don't care for farming and I was playing this mission for fun before. Even if I had some terrible pug-mates, those pug-mates were trying and effort is appreciated.
Post edited by alex284 on
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Most of us saying the change would improve things talked about how not having insta-fails would encourage more new players to try advanced and to keep trying it instead of giving up after a failure or two. It sounds like that is working.
Speaking only for myself, I never claimed it would "improve teamwork" or end world hunger*
( * counter-straw! )
Interestingly I would say that my pug success rate before for this mission was around 15% whereas I've gotten the optionals around 50% now with slightly more difficult optionals.
I'm more on the fence now about the idea of optionals. I would like to see more people playing the missions and being interested in them. I don't ever see this being possible if they are forced to play normal as that makes them feel like a loser. So I have previously argued for making advanced more accessible for the health of the game.
However, at this point I really just don't care anymore. I have plenty of resources. I play now solely for fun (and spec points for alts).
I do think you can still get a rush of excitement trying to beat the optionals much as ISE used to be. I may have played it 1000 times yet I tried for the optionals hard each and every time.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
People keep complaining about how PUG's suck and cannot complete advanced and yet they desperately try to keep them in advanced by not encouraging them to try normal.
The problem with the queues is not the fail conditions, it is people not going in prepared. If you are not prepared, then why should you get the full reward.
?? If you fail the optionals you don't get the full reward. You now just don't insta-fail and lose the R&D mat.
Skipping the rest, cause I've already wasted too much time arguing with the folks in favor of the changes...
I did want to address this first bit, though. Cause, imho, the old ANRA was flawed too. Folks could have an extremely easy or an extremely difficult initial set of ships - it was too random, again imho. If they'd just done a set group of ships for the initial, they could have done something with the ANRN, ANRA, ANRE reflecting those initial ships. Would have given something folks something better to prepare for - cause going from ANRN to ANRA could be as easy as ANRN or as difficult as something that would be beyond ANRE would be if it existed.
...but yeah, the rest - folks tried to point that out before the changes, and folks didn't want to listen. /shrug
I wish there was a way to avoid the "feel like a loser for playing normal". It is normal, by definition it should be the most common one. Otherwise the names should be " basic / normal / elite".
But too many people seem to want the advanced or even elite to be defacto "normal". I'm pretty much with you though. At this point advanced needs to be accessible for the health of the community.
Super Number One Wondrous Fantastic Legendary Awesome Killer Excellent
...though folks might just refer to it as the Snowflake tier.
Winner mode
Annoying mode
Don't try this at home mode
Just like I always felt it was silly to call the only gear anyone uses "rare" or "very rare". Technically, white is " very rare" and purple is "common".
You Must Be This Tall To STF
The Executives' Club STF
Meh, sorry...the thing about doing Normal and being loser just ticked me off. If I haven't run something before or if it's a new character, etc, etc, etc...odds are I'm going to hit up Normal. I'm not going to feel like a loser for doing Normal.
The whole "loser" thing just irked me. Somebody else called somebody a loser? Why care? And even worse, why on Earth would anybody call themselves a loser?
Advanced Ques are the only means of back to back access to BNPs and such. Otherwise players are forced in some cases to go through the normal missions once every 20 hours for what they want. APCs Im looking at you.
Why should they be forced to wait 20 hours when they have the time on their hands now to obtain them? Oh. Right because some elitest jerk who thinks he knows whats best for the rest of the playerbase said so.
Theres a reason those queues are dead. And its because of those who demanded changes that affected everyone. Not just those asking for them. So here we are. The queues are dead and Cryptic is doing what they can to kickstart them. If only Cryptic would stop listening to the 'Its not Challenging Enough' crowd. This game wouldnt have suffered over the last 6 months.
When did they add ANRE?
edit: Btw, too...there's no ISE, CSE, KSE, CCE, and er...got to look...no AAE, no UAE, nor VSE. Not a Grounder, so what's missing there? No IGE, KGE, CGE, nor MTE.
The new stuff coming Tuesday is going to have N/A/E for everything, right? Don't recall off hand and don't feel like logging into Tribble to look.
edit2: Oh Hell, why not...
The Herald Sphere...Normal, Advanced, & Elite.
Gateway to Gre'thor...Normal, Advanced, & Elite.
Brotherhood of the Sword...Normal, Advanced, & Elite.
Cause the longest E-Marks to get outside of queues right now would be APCs...taking two weeks to get all you'd need for everything (well, another few days if you wanted both the Singularity and Warp Core)...which will be made even shorter with the 100:1 conversion coming Tuesday.
Speaking of that, though, has anybody seen anything about an alternative method other than the 100:1 for the Iconian E-Marks? I haven't seen anything and was just wondering...
...but yeah, so it gets back to the VR R&D Mats - where even though the prices on all of them have come down, some are still stuck to a few queues that folks don't run that much of, folks use a bunch of, and so forth so the supply demand thing has kept their prices much higher than other things that at times hardly seem worth the trip to the Exchange to list (heh, even if you call the Exchange to you to do it).
Which would get back to the whole ANRA thing, yeah? And the OP's complaint that folks are doing the minimal amount necessary to avoid an AFK penalty while somebody frees the one ship so folks get the R&D Mats...which has little to do with the OP or anybody else being an Elitist. And what would happen to other queues if they were given the ANRA treatment...none of which has anything to do with anybody being Elitist.
Course, if Cryptic were to make those R&D Mats available easily outside of queues too...then the queues could be completely written off since everything they reward would be easier to get elsewhere.
edit: Mind you, I'm in the crowd of making the various rewards available in Normal as well (they've made most of the rewards available outside of the queues, why not in the queues with Normal, eh)...cause I'd rather that folks leech Normal than Advanced. Mind you too, as I mentioned about the missing Elites...I wish Cryptic would add those for those folks too.
No worries and sorry if anything I said came off that way. What I meant to address is the us vs them mentality where one group says "its so easy to do x DPs, if you can't its your fault" and those who respond with "you're the problem, you're why cryptic made things too hard".
Underneath that hostility, both people are feeling shame and dealing with it by projection/displacement.
I was trying to say there shouldn't be any stigma about normal, maybe brainstorm ideas on how to work around it.
I think it is OK for people to make a lot of money on crafting. I think none of the mats are so rare they are out of reach. It like the e-marks where there was literaly no way to get the stuff for some people.
Right now the most expensive rare mats (not components) sell in the 170k to 240k range depending on day, time etc. Z-particles which you can get from a bajillion sources sell for 45kish. Pretend cryptic added a rnd conversion, 6 z-particles:any 1 rare mat of your choice.
Well, the auction house has that conversion available right now, and you can rum more than 5 at a time.