Were all DOFF assignments rewarding at such a level? No? Hrmmm...so it wasn't a nerf, eh?
There were certain assignments that were rewarding far better than intended and much better than the majority of the assignments? Yes? Hrmmm...so it was a bug fix, eh?
Are those that were exploiting those bugged assignments...crying? Yes? Hrmmm...so it's standard for the forums, eh?
12 hour assignments were intended to reward at a much higher level than longer or shorter assignments. That was a design deicision.
They're the devs and can change their mind at any time but kindly stop painting it as a bug or code error when we have posts from Heretic who invented the system where he explains why the bump is there and why he deliberately put it in.
Let me try and clear up a few misconceptions and possibly even cool some heads around here, regarding the Doffing XP adjustment. Fix. Let's call it what it is: we fixed an error in the code.
When you see a string of numbers laid out as:
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 40, 3, 2, 1
... you don't presume it's correct. And once you've determined that the series has an inconsistency, you find yourself with what we in Design sometimes call "a bump in the floor."
As in, if you have a big flat floor with one obvious bump in it, you don't raise the entire floor to the level of the bump. You take a hammer to that thing, and you fix it.
This fix was not made with the conscious intention of decreasing anyone's enjoyment of the game, or ability to earn XP/CXP, or anything else we're currently being accused of. The fix was made because it is a fix -- a problem existed, and had to be corrected.
So, yes: Doff Assignments with durations between 12 and 15.9 hours were awarding roughly 10x the amount of numerics they were designed to reward. I'm sorry if you assumed that was an intended part of the system, but it was, in fact, an egregious misplacement of a decimal place, and needed to be corrected.
We will take another look at Doff Assignment XP gain as a whole in the near future, and see if it's reasonable to consider any sort of systemic increases. But we aren't going to add back in a bug, or revert a fix to such an obvious error.
Save your breath, i dont think they want to listen
I believe God created the universe, because he knew we wanted to explore. So, he made us a playground...
Borticus, please consider the history of these assignments.
Originally, the only 12 hour assignments were Suppress Gorn Uprising, and they were an incentive to play kdf, something to balance the lack of kdf content like ships, costumes, and team mates that is still a real thing.
You guys forgot about this after Heretic left, and added more and more 12 hour missions, first in the dyson sphere and then in the delta quadrant. The high xp on these missions is not unintentional, what was unintentional was adding more and more missions to the previously unique 12 hour section.
geko posted on Twitter about knowing the facts, these are the facts.
If you don't want there to be so many 12 hour xp missions, just change the delta quadrant and dyson sphere ones to a different duration.
This is a huge blow to the kdf in the game, these missions, like kdf contraband missions, are a central incentive for playing kdf toons, they are a way to balance the lower amount of content like ships and costumes vis a vis the fed faction.
This is -not- a bug and -not- unintentional.
Making more and more 12 hour missions was a bug, and the fix is to fix those missions which were put in the 12 hour slot in error.
There is also the fact that many missions also take "resources" and a large number of DOFFs. A 6 hour assignment might take one Doff and be "free". A 12 hour might take 6 and use a couple of types of commodities.
Herertic balanced a lot of the rewards by the time involved and requirements to do the mission. You usually "pay" for the increased rewards in some way.
So for many you either have to replicate materials or a have done a few missions A & B to have every thing needed for C.
Let me try and clear up a few misconceptions and possibly even cool some heads around here, regarding the Doffing XP adjustment. Fix. Let's call it what it is: we fixed an error in the code.
When you see a string of numbers laid out as:
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 40, 3, 2, 1
... you don't presume it's correct. And once you've determined that the series has an inconsistency, you find yourself with what we in Design sometimes call "a bump in the floor."
As in, if you have a big flat floor with one obvious bump in it, you don't raise the entire floor to the level of the bump. You take a hammer to that thing, and you fix it.
This fix was not made with the conscious intention of decreasing anyone's enjoyment of the game, or ability to earn XP/CXP, or anything else we're currently being accused of. The fix was made because it is a fix -- a problem existed, and had to be corrected.
So, yes: Doff Assignments with durations between 12 and 15.9 hours were awarding roughly 10x the amount of numerics they were designed to reward. I'm sorry if you assumed that was an intended part of the system, but it was, in fact, an egregious misplacement of a decimal place, and needed to be corrected.
We will take another look at Doff Assignment XP gain as a whole in the near future, and see if it's reasonable to consider any sort of systemic increases. But we aren't going to add back in a bug, or revert a fix to such an obvious error.
May I suggest another fix?
We are told to make 160.000 XP for just one lousy level-up. That number must be broken.
Yes, it must be broken because it would mean that we need to play thousands of missions in order to level up and earn spec points.
And dont even dare to tell me that we dont need these spec points to play the game.
You want to sell your command and intelligence ships... great... they come with special boff stations and in order to train these boffs you need to get spec points.
You have created a game environments where there are requirements that the average player could NEVER even fulfill.
That is where this game is broken. That is what needs to be fixed.
Since Delta Rising the whole game is just a mess.
We have massive XP games in this game because you guys have doubled the XP rewards and trippled the XP requirements at the same time. And since that you remain silient about these kinds of issues.... you nerf a bit here and there which makes the situation even worse for the players.
But a fix for the absurd requirements in this game are not in sight.
There you remain silent and hope that players calm down eventually.
Fact is... players did not calm down.
And your only solution to counter the crappy situation is to do this delta recruitment TRIBBLE where new chars get a bonus.
Guess what... after 4 weeks my delta alts which I tried to push and level up have by far not hit lvl60 yet. Not one of them is there. And Ive made use of the XP bonus week.
There is a massive gap between what players need to do in this game and what players actually can do. And thats exactly where you developers have closed your eyes for more than half a year, hoping that the problems on the server would go away without that you have to admit doing design failures.
Guess what... that wont happen.
Players have created their delta als... and these players will abbandon them as soon this event is over. STO remains at the same dead end that it used to be before.
And with every release of new content the gap between old and new players will grow bigger just because there is a massive difference between what players need and what developers want us to do.
Players dont want 50 different reputation systems. Players dont want another 500 spec points (when you effectivly can only use 45 of them). Players dont want to log into the game knowing that today they have only to grind 8 hours before they can do something that is fun.
STO used to be fun before Delta Rising. Now its just work and many of the guys I used to play with have totally lost the interest in this game because the developers have only one answer to the flawed game mechanics: Make evering more grindy and harder to play because players love to lose and get punished by the devs.
What's cheesing me is the shady nature of this..just like the shady nature of requiring 3x more XP to level but NOT adjusting the Doff XP payout to compensate, creating an obvious nerf, even though one was promised.
In this case, its that they are not ONLY adjusting the XP for 12 hour missions. Saying that is disingenuous at best, blatant lying at worst.
May I suggest another fix?
We are told to make 160.000 XP for just one lousy level-up. That number must be broken.
Yes, it must be broken because it would mean that we need to play thousands of missions in order to level up and earn spec points.
And dont even dare to tell me that we dont need these spec points to play the game.
You want to sell your command and intelligence ships... great... they come with special boff stations and in order to train these boffs you need to get spec points.
You have created a game environments where there are requirements that the average player could NEVER even fulfill.
That is where this game is broken. That is what needs to be fixed.
Since Delta Rising the whole game is just a mess.
We have massive XP games in this game because you guys have doubled the XP rewards and trippled the XP requirements at the same time. And since that you remain silient about these kinds of issues.... you nerf a bit here and there which makes the situation even worse for the players.
But a fix for the absurd requirements in this game are not in sight.
There you remain silent and hope that players calm down eventually.
Fact is... players did not calm down.
And your only solution to counter the crappy situation is to do this delta recruitment TRIBBLE where new chars get a bonus.
Guess what... after 4 weeks my delta alts which I tried to push and level up have by far not hit lvl60 yet. Not one of them is there. And Ive made use of the XP bonus week.
There is a massive gap between what players need to do in this game and what players actually can do. And thats exactly where you developers have closed your eyes for more than half a year, hoping that the problems on the server would go away without that you have to admit doing design failures.
Guess what... that wont happen.
Players have created their delta als... and these players will abbandon them as soon this event is over. STO remains at the same dead end that it used to be before.
And with every release of new content the gap between old and new players will grow bigger just because there is a massive difference between what players need and what developers want us to do.
Players dont want 50 different reputation systems. Players dont want another 500 spec points (when you effectivly can only use 45 of them). Players dont want to log into the game knowing that today they have only to grind 8 hours before they can do something that is fun.
STO used to be fun before Delta Rising. Now its just work and many of the guys I used to play with have totally lost the interest in this game because the developers have only one answer to the flawed game mechanics: Make evering more grindy and harder to play because players love to lose and get punished by the devs.
then you also have throw in the skills resets people had to put up with and now the fatal DX errors that prevent many from logging in or forcing us to play in safe mode.
This discussion will go endlessly until the devs adjust the 50-60 XP curve and the amount of XP per Spec point. But they won't do that unless their design intent changes. I don't think it will, as it would affect their metrics, or so they think.
Unfortunately, they fail to see that shoving that much grind in our faces have negative consequences in the long term, even for their metrics.
How frustrating you fix all these minor R&D bugs and leave the more major ones broken. How many more years do we need to wait before we can craft our own projectile tech to upgrade our own projectile consoles? It would be nice if at rank 20 R&D projectiles I could upgrade projectile vulnerability consoles.
Because no one works like that. If you got a bump in your floor, would you raise everything else to that level?
You eliminate outliers, not change the base.
sure, if you're going at it without any context.
in this case, the ground level is flooded by a river and only the bump is standing above the water level. pounding it down means there's no more dry land. raising the whole floor level means everything is now dry.
the flooding water is grinding. bump is the only place where you can be relatively dry, and where grinding isn't as bad as everywhere else.
Now clowns, that's another story. They scare the crap out of me.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
Is it normal that some UI icons, specifically the doff's traits in the active roster, shake? I mean literally shake, even if I'm idle. It's something I noticed also in the new sector space on the Fleet Intrepid, where the windows appear and disappear while moving.
Is anyone else having this issue?
I need to get to him. I can't just leave him out there alone. - Sometimes you've got to makes sacrifices, Lara. You can't save everyone. - I know about sacrifices. - No, you know about loss. Sacrifice is a choice you make. Loss is a choice made for you. - I can't choose to let him die, Roth.
in this case, the ground level is flooded by a river and only the bump is standing above the water level. pounding it down means there's no more dry land. raising the whole floor level means everything is now dry.
the flooding water is grinding. bump is the only place where you can be relatively dry, and where grinding isn't as bad as everywhere else.
Where did he ever mention water? You are just adding assumed information to try and change the argument.
i see the metaphor is completely lost on you, despite adding an explanation on the bottom, explaining what is what.
water is a symbol for grind, just as the bump is a symbol for the implied bug.
water surrounding everything means the entire doffing system is drowning in grind, since you need to redo it over and over to get results. the bump is the little bit of of dry land, the 12 hour missions that reward reasonable amounts of xp, thus lessening the grind, or preventing you from having constantly wet shoes.
and to sum it up, he blindly agreed with the "need to pound the bump into the ground to level it" without considering why or if elevating the rest of the floor would be any better, simply dismissing it and any context and reasons surrounding the thing as if none ever existed.
Now clowns, that's another story. They scare the crap out of me.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
12 hour assignments were intended to reward at a much higher level than longer or shorter assignments. That was a design deicision.
They're the devs and can change their mind at any time but kindly stop painting it as a bug or code error when we have posts from Heretic who invented the system where he explains why the bump is there and why he deliberately put it in.
Let me also add...you DO know that the 12 hour missions paying out like that was intentional, right? It was the epitome of Game Theory that Heretic was trying to employ based on people real-life schedules. this is about the experience.
A 12 hour mission rewards more XP than a 1 hour mission. That's pretty natural, given that the duration is 12 times longer than then 1 hour mission. The way it's been working for the past 3 years has been as intended by it's designer (Heretic), seeing as one of the features of the Duty Officer system was to allow players an alternate route to level up, besides the constant combat missions (which is far removed from the spirit of Trek).
The way you guys have now haphazardly nerfed the 12 hour missions, throws the entire balance out of whack. The duration is still 12 hours, but the rewards are now less than the aforementioned 1 hour missions.
Not only is there no actual quote given, but it's wrong as well...well, partially wrong - from not understanding how the rewards are determined - which is easy to quote from Heretic at the start of the DOFF 101 thread.
An assignment's degree of reward is based on several factors:
Rarer assignments have better rewards
Longer assignments have higher absolute rewards, but lower per capita/per second rewards (i.e., they are less efficient)
Assignments that have a higher chance of injury or death will have higher rewards
Assignments that have higher inputs (commodities, anomalies, energy units, etc.) will have higher rewards
Assignments that have no chance of disaster or failure will have lower rewards
Assignments that have a lower chance of success will have higher rewards; most assignments start at around 75% chance of success, but some are closer to 50%, meaning you need to put better duty officers into them for a more reliable chance of success
Assignments with more specific requirements will have higher rewards; for example, a requirement of "Projectile Weapons Specialist" will generally reward more than one that will take any Tactical officer
Assignments with tougher trait modifiers will tend to have higher rewards
And oh, in talking about the duration and rewards, he said this:
Rewards are scaled based on time (although longer assignments are per capita not as rewarding, since they require less micromanagement on the part of the player), assignment rarity, success versus critical success determination, amount of inputs (so if you have to put commodities or another type of item to do it, it will generally be more rewarding), danger to the assigned crew, chance of success, and existence of non-numerical rewards.
So "everything else" equal, a 6 hour assignment will reward more than a 1 hour assignment - but 6x 1 hour assignments will reward more than the 6 hour assignment.
Which would mean 2x 6 hour should reward more than 1x 12 hour, "everything else" equal...but oopsie, eh?
Provide significant non-combat gameplay that fills the desire for less overtly aggressive styles of gameplay.
Create an engaging logistical mini-game.
Provide a supplementary or even alternative character advancement mechanic - this will be useful for both factions, but in particular should somewhat ease advancement issues in the KDF.
Establish a new set of parallel achievement goals and rewards in the form of the Commendation part of the system to give more goals for players who have hit cap.
Provide alternative and supplementary mechanics and support to an array of frustrations apparent in existing systems such as the process for gathering anomalies, gaining high quality bridge officers, the Diplomacy grind, the lack of a parallel Diplomacy system on the KDF side, lack of usage for commodities, need for more Energy Credit sinks, and so on.
...but that doesn't say anything about "special 12 hour assignments" rewarding like they do.
Casually DOFFing nothing longer than an 8 hour, I've gotten 9 toons from 14 to 56-58. Guess what...alternative advancement!
* * * * *
So does somebody actually have a quote of Heretic saying anything about the 12 hours? Or are folks just going to keep playing kindergarten telephone operator and parroting hearsay?
Cause the quotable stuff there...disagrees with what people are saying.
Maybe I missed somebody quoting something. I did a search with the forum search for "Heretic" and looked through the posts since these notes went live.
more than a 1 hour assignment - but 6x 1 hour assignments will reward more than the 6 hour assignment.
Which would mean 2x 6 hour should reward more than 1x 12 hour, "everything else" equal...but oopsie, eh?
Um, the 12 hour missions (as currently implement) DO reward less XP on a per-hour basis than comparable missions - that is, same mission rareness, which don't give items as rewards.
Dividing the 12 hour missions by 10 would result in them being worse than uncommon missions of shorter duration. Not even on a relative level - on an absolute level, they would give fewer xp.
An assignment's degree of reward is based on several factors:
Rarer assignments have better rewards
Longer assignments have higher absolute rewards, but lower per capita/per second rewards (i.e., they are less efficient)
Assignments that have a higher chance of injury or death will have higher rewards
Assignments that have higher inputs (commodities, anomalies, energy units, etc.) will have higher rewards
Assignments that have no chance of disaster or failure will have lower rewards
Assignments that have a lower chance of success will have higher rewards; most assignments start at around 75% chance of success, but some are closer to 50%, meaning you need to put better duty officers into them for a more reliable chance of success
Assignments with more specific requirements will have higher rewards; for example, a requirement of "Projectile Weapons Specialist" will generally reward more than one that will take any Tactical officer
Assignments with tougher trait modifiers will tend to have higher rewards
It seems rather cruel to expect me to go digging through notes on a system I disagree with Heretic implementation of when I fundamentally do agree with Borticus and Geko's ideas for changes just to make me backup my claim that Borticus and Geko's changes represent a different design philosophy rather than a true bugfix. Because even when I find the posts (and they exist) saying that DOffing was designed to penalize too frequently or too infrequently and supporting the idea that the multiplier is NOT a big, my position is STILL that I wouldn't necessarily stick with Heretic's vision in STO if I had my druthers.
My stance is legitimately that I support (cautious) changes to the system but that it is considerably more complex than Geko and Borticus are making it out to be. Which doesn't mean I still don't support yanking out the heart of the system's design and replacing it. I feel like my stance isn't being taken at face value when somebody asks me to prove it. I'm being asked to dig up dirt against a nerf I have no essential problem with as long as it's plainly labeled as a nerf.
Here's one where he says time is not the most important variable behind reward, meaning it is not intended to be linear:
The rewards are based to a minor extent on time of the assignment, but primarily on the amount of micro the player has to do to set them up as well as the risk versus reward of the assignment.
Another post, indicating that full time DOffing is intended to be roughly 50% the XP of playing for the same amount of time and a meaningful supplement to play.
The ultimate goal as far as skill points and the duty officer system is that if you were to spend 100% of your time with the system and were smart about how you did it, you could conceivably level at mildly better than half the speed you could if you were leveling through other methods. Note, this 100% of your time refers to you being actively logged in, checking the Exchange for better officers, traveling back to Qo'noS or Starfleet Academy, checking sector blocks for various assignments, and so on.
The current allocation of skill points very well may need to be reined in again to hit this goal; due to bugs and balance issues the initial several weeks the system was live saw a progression rate that was in excess of these goals. Once we get some additional hard numbers, we will be in a better position to determine what needs still to be done to approach these targets more closely than is currently the case.
We do, however, wish for it to remain to be a viable, albeit not optimal, method of leveling.
In practice, we expect most players who engage in the system to use it as an auxiliary to their normal play rather than a substitute, although some will certainly choose to use it as a substitute, and we're fine with that as well given the above considerations.
Another post, indicating that full time DOffing is intended to be roughly 50% the XP of playing for the same amount of time and a meaningful supplement to play.
The ultimate goal as far as skill points and the duty officer system is that if you were to spend 100% of your time with the system and were smart about how you did it, you could conceivably level at mildly better than half the speed you could if you were leveling through other methods. Note, this 100% of your time refers to you being actively logged in, checking the Exchange for better officers, traveling back to Qo'noS or Starfleet Academy, checking sector blocks for various assignments, and so on.
The current allocation of skill points very well may need to be reined in again to hit this goal; due to bugs and balance issues the initial several weeks the system was live saw a progression rate that was in excess of these goals. Once we get some additional hard numbers, we will be in a better position to determine what needs still to be done to approach these targets more closely than is currently the case.
We do, however, wish for it to remain to be a viable, albeit not optimal, method of leveling.
In practice, we expect most players who engage in the system to use it as an auxiliary to their normal play rather than a substitute, although some will certainly choose to use it as a substitute, and we're fine with that as well given the above considerations.
Right, but in reading that...
Somebody actively DOFFs for an hour, that should provide "mildly better than 50%" the return as if they were playing other content for half an hour.
That's not a case of spending 5-10 minutes to set some DOFF assignments. Cause that 5-10 minutes would be the actual play...so the expectation for 5-10 minutes would be just "mildly better than 50%" meaning somewhere between 2.5-5 minutes or so of actual play.
He even states there that it very well may need to be reigned in because of potentially providing better than intended returns.
Course, he left around 8 months later.
But yeah, if I play an hour a day where all I'm doing is DOFFing...based on what he said there, it would take me mildly less than twice as long as somebody playing an hour a day that was doing stuff. And somebody that worked the DOFFing into what they were doing, would see a better return than somebody that didn't.
That particular post just points to those particular assignments being that much more overrewarding than first suggested.
STO used to be fun before Delta Rising. Now its just work and many of the guys I used to play with have totally lost the interest in this game because the developers have only one answer to the flawed game mechanics: Make evering more grindy and harder to play because players love to lose and get punished by the devs.
Prior to Delta Rising the small group that I played with could on any given night field enough players to run two teams for STFs. After Delta Rising, I and maybe two others remain. The rest left to play SWTOR. Tomorrow starts SWTOR 12x XP event. Obviously this is not an XP weekend, but it's also not a XP day, nor a week, this 12x XP event is going to last months. Guess what the rest of the STO holdouts will be playing starting tomorrow? Sometimes it pays to listen to your customers and let them play the game that they want to play or else they will eventually go on to another game that lets them.
If you received them from any promo other than referral, they were not account-wide items and were boxed.
If you received them from the referral promo, claiming them from the C-Store places them BOUND in your inventory.
Source: I just tested this, since I had the original referral promo.
If you had a boxed version, it is not the referral version. The referral version is claimed from the legacy unlock tab of the C-Store.
I have tried explaining to everyone many times over. Mine are in fact 100% from the referral program. Cryptic won't look into it anyways. I have tried for over a year. Only response I get from cryptic support is that "referral items are one time only unlocks, anyone that says otherwise is not telling the truth." Or from most players, "referral rewards can be reclaimed in the c-store"
Thanks for the info though, I don't remember mine being boxed, but I do know they are from the referral program.
Maybe the devs should start giving all the complainers a serious nerf on their accounts, then the complainers, will have something to complain about.
Bet you all are the ones that complain when they give free stuff to everyone.
If you not happy, stop playing, take a break or something, cause seriously, with all the complaining you all do, you rub off on people and spread your negativity and im half expecting the devs will do something in retaliation to all of us because you people cant just have your say and then drop it and move on like adults do, no, gotta carry on like children....grow up. You had your say, now drop it!
21 pages and growing. Do you all think they are going to change their minds? With the name calling, borderline abuse,accusations, and what nots, do you all really, honestly think they will change their minds with the way you guys are treating them??
If i was a forum moderator, some of you would be banned.
Cue the white knight remarks :P
I believe God created the universe, because he knew we wanted to explore. So, he made us a playground...
Maybe the devs should start giving all the complainers a serious nerf on their accounts, then the complainers, will have something to complain about.
Bet you all are the ones that complain when they give free stuff to everyone.
If you not happy, stop playing, take a break or something, cause seriously, with all the complaining you all do, you rub off on people and spread your negativity and im half expecting the devs will do something in retaliation to all of us because you people cant just have your say and then drop it and move on like adults do, no, gotta carry on like children....grow up. You had your say, now drop it!
21 pages and growing. Do you all think they are going to change their minds? With the name calling, borderline abuse,accusations, and what nots, do you all really, honestly think they will change their minds with the way you guys are treating them??
If i was a forum moderator, some of you would be banned.
Cue the white knight remarks :P
There are two serious issues here that need to be stated. The first is:
1) When you bring out these fixes, we're flat out called cheaters. Every. Single. Time. It's never 'This isn't in line with our skill curve' or 'This isn't balanced to the way we feel things should be played'. It's always "You guys are exploiting, you should have KNOWN this isn't how we want you to play!" - and it's getting really insulting and really old, really fast.
2) This is the important one. For players like me - this change is an annoyance, but it won't bother me. My main is fairly heavily invested in the spec trees, he can craft manuals for alts. He can play with the fun kit modules. But for new players - the new potential hardcore players who want to pvp, or want to get in the 80k plus club... They're so far behind they might as well head to ToR now. With the 12 hour missions - they could potentially have their primary skill tree filled in a month. Now, if they don't have 18 hours a day to invest in killing the same mobs over and over and over - they're finished. They can never catch up to us 'cheaters' who ran 12 hour doff missions, or went to Argala.
They are behind, and no matter how hard they try to catch up, us 'cheaters' will be that far ahead in the new skill trees. The new powers. Little Suzy who wants to come in and get into PVP - she not only behind in gear, but she's also two spec trees in power behind everyone else. And these trees DO give an advantage. Passive health, turn, weapons, resistances. The spec trees are powerful, and she can't catch up. There's no feasible way for her to 'grind' and catch up. Doffing is just about useless after this change and everything else trickles the xp.
Cryptic - you guys need to look at some other games and think about this. Your competitors are giving players ways to play to skip all the boring BS and just run the fun missions. Your competitors have enough content that there's no 'grinding one map for 8 hours just to see the next story mission'.
I've been here since Beta. I'm not going anywhere. I love the game - and while I might be frustrated, I'm sticking it out. But for anyone new - for anyone considering picking this up - you might as well be asking them to climb Mount Everest instead of 'play a game'.
Now this next part is where you're hurting yourself where older players are involved. Those of us who are invested in Intel or Command or Pilot - those of us who have bought ships on a whim because we could fill the spec tree and get absolutely everything out of them... When your new spec trees and new ships come out - instead of a cash register, all you'll hear is a universal "/meh. I can use what I have now."
And if the doff nerf wasnt enuf, why nerf iconian STFs? There were hardly played even now. And BoS was giving too much? Its ridiculous, on normal you barely get 20 marks for 15 mins of play, compared with a battlezone where for 2-3 mins of a capturing point u get 10 marks.
And good luck playing GoG, it will be pretty much dead from now on.
Yea that one got me puzzled a bit. I mean empty queue lists are nothing new since Delta Rising but I made the unfortunate mistakes of taking a look at running games after a Dirext X crash to desktop forced me to try to get back to my team after the game decided to put me out of the PvE map uppon relogging.
Did not take me long to find it because only 1 dozen PvE machtes seemed to have been running in all of STO.
Am I reading it wrong or is PvE as dead as PvP?
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Yea that one got me puzzled a bit. I mean empty queue lists are nothing new since Delta Rising but I made the unfortunate mistakes of taking a look at running games after a Dirext X crash to desktop forced me to try to get back to my team after the game decided to put me out of the PvE map uppon relogging.
Did not take me long to find it because only 1 dozen PvE machtes seemed to have been running in all of STO.
Am I reading it wrong or is PvE as dead as PvP?
"Advanced now fails if the team does not save a single transport in phase 2.
Numbers have been adjusted to provide the same as, or rewards greater than previous.
Advanced mentions player must save one to pass."
It seems to me that you just need to save one transport to make it. how in the world is this a nerf ?
"Advanced now fails if the team does not save a single transport in phase 2.
Numbers have been adjusted to provide the same as, or rewards greater than previous.
Advanced mentions player must save one to pass."
It seems to me that you just need to save one transport to make it. how in the world is this a nerf ?
Thats all fine and good. Im just trying to find out why participation in some maps seem to approach a new low. They can have me save as many transport as they want for all I care, Im just unlikely to play it when I get three times the outcome on other maps doing them via toon hops in the same time. But then again, the new ground one gets the mark nerf now accordingly.
Im confident Cryptic has balanced the rewards by the time Im done with that reput on 9 toons. As far as marks are concerned this could very well be before this patch goes even live on Thursday.
Only time will tell which of the 3 new maps will be used in the long run by the community. As far as design is concerned they got us some cool variety. One Space DPS feast, one low DPS although heavily time gated map and a cool ground one which turned out to be one of my most favourite maps to date.
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The Devs just don't get it. Most players don't get it either. While I understand that it looks like a bug or broken doff mission, and it might be? Here is what players are upset about. Players want to earn Spec Points for their Specialization, who does not? Players don't mind earning rewards and completing missions! So here is my compromise. As of right now I can name numerous missions not rewarding kill Spec Exp for kills. I also think the whole doff mission rewards need to be balanced! So hold off on the fix until the whole doff CXP and SPXP can be fixed. Geko already said he wanted to balance out the rewards, which sound fair. Now of course missions need to take a few things into account for rewards. So we standardize all rewards based on time to complete, the amount of doffs required, items that the mission takes, and success.
I see it working like this.
1 doff for a one hour mission of less is 100 SPXP
Additional doff multiples mission by .25 per doff
2 hour mission base x2
4 hour mission base x3
8 hour mission base x4
12 hour mission base x5
24 hour mission base x6
72 hour mission base x10
So if you have a 12 hour mission and 5 doffs on it you would earn 625 SPXP
Then base success vs crit
While the devs are fixing this they can also fix the areas that are not rewarding SPXP for enemy kills! Kabali Ground 53-57 areas. Vicious Cycle Elite, and Gates of Gre'Thor.
All it is is a delay until the entire problem get fixed.
Comments
12 hour assignments were intended to reward at a much higher level than longer or shorter assignments. That was a design deicision.
They're the devs and can change their mind at any time but kindly stop painting it as a bug or code error when we have posts from Heretic who invented the system where he explains why the bump is there and why he deliberately put it in.
Save your breath, i dont think they want to listen
There is also the fact that many missions also take "resources" and a large number of DOFFs. A 6 hour assignment might take one Doff and be "free". A 12 hour might take 6 and use a couple of types of commodities.
Herertic balanced a lot of the rewards by the time involved and requirements to do the mission. You usually "pay" for the increased rewards in some way.
So for many you either have to replicate materials or a have done a few missions A & B to have every thing needed for C.
May I suggest another fix?
We are told to make 160.000 XP for just one lousy level-up. That number must be broken.
Yes, it must be broken because it would mean that we need to play thousands of missions in order to level up and earn spec points.
And dont even dare to tell me that we dont need these spec points to play the game.
You want to sell your command and intelligence ships... great... they come with special boff stations and in order to train these boffs you need to get spec points.
You have created a game environments where there are requirements that the average player could NEVER even fulfill.
That is where this game is broken. That is what needs to be fixed.
Since Delta Rising the whole game is just a mess.
We have massive XP games in this game because you guys have doubled the XP rewards and trippled the XP requirements at the same time. And since that you remain silient about these kinds of issues.... you nerf a bit here and there which makes the situation even worse for the players.
But a fix for the absurd requirements in this game are not in sight.
There you remain silent and hope that players calm down eventually.
Fact is... players did not calm down.
And your only solution to counter the crappy situation is to do this delta recruitment TRIBBLE where new chars get a bonus.
Guess what... after 4 weeks my delta alts which I tried to push and level up have by far not hit lvl60 yet. Not one of them is there. And Ive made use of the XP bonus week.
There is a massive gap between what players need to do in this game and what players actually can do. And thats exactly where you developers have closed your eyes for more than half a year, hoping that the problems on the server would go away without that you have to admit doing design failures.
Guess what... that wont happen.
Players have created their delta als... and these players will abbandon them as soon this event is over. STO remains at the same dead end that it used to be before.
And with every release of new content the gap between old and new players will grow bigger just because there is a massive difference between what players need and what developers want us to do.
Players dont want 50 different reputation systems. Players dont want another 500 spec points (when you effectivly can only use 45 of them). Players dont want to log into the game knowing that today they have only to grind 8 hours before they can do something that is fun.
STO used to be fun before Delta Rising. Now its just work and many of the guys I used to play with have totally lost the interest in this game because the developers have only one answer to the flawed game mechanics: Make evering more grindy and harder to play because players love to lose and get punished by the devs.
In this case, its that they are not ONLY adjusting the XP for 12 hour missions. Saying that is disingenuous at best, blatant lying at worst.
then you also have throw in the skills resets people had to put up with and now the fatal DX errors that prevent many from logging in or forcing us to play in safe mode.
if this game was mechanic, a dry cleaners or caf
Unfortunately, they fail to see that shoving that much grind in our faces have negative consequences in the long term, even for their metrics.
STO Screenshot Archive
in this case, the ground level is flooded by a river and only the bump is standing above the water level. pounding it down means there's no more dry land. raising the whole floor level means everything is now dry.
the flooding water is grinding. bump is the only place where you can be relatively dry, and where grinding isn't as bad as everywhere else.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
Is anyone else having this issue?
Where did he ever mention water? You are just adding assumed information to try and change the argument.
water is a symbol for grind, just as the bump is a symbol for the implied bug.
water surrounding everything means the entire doffing system is drowning in grind, since you need to redo it over and over to get results. the bump is the little bit of of dry land, the 12 hour missions that reward reasonable amounts of xp, thus lessening the grind, or preventing you from having constantly wet shoes.
and to sum it up, he blindly agreed with the "need to pound the bump into the ground to level it" without considering why or if elevating the rest of the floor would be any better, simply dismissing it and any context and reasons surrounding the thing as if none ever existed.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
Where are these posts?
There was no quote of Heretic involved.
Again, no quote involved.
No quote given there either.
Saying isn't providing any quotes of it being said.
Awesome...but where's the actual quote?
Not only is there no actual quote given, but it's wrong as well...well, partially wrong - from not understanding how the rewards are determined - which is easy to quote from Heretic at the start of the DOFF 101 thread.
Where this was said:
And oh, in talking about the duration and rewards, he said this:
So "everything else" equal, a 6 hour assignment will reward more than a 1 hour assignment - but 6x 1 hour assignments will reward more than the 6 hour assignment.
Which would mean 2x 6 hour should reward more than 1x 12 hour, "everything else" equal...but oopsie, eh?
There's this...
...but that doesn't say anything about "special 12 hour assignments" rewarding like they do.
Casually DOFFing nothing longer than an 8 hour, I've gotten 9 toons from 14 to 56-58. Guess what...alternative advancement!
* * * * *
So does somebody actually have a quote of Heretic saying anything about the 12 hours? Or are folks just going to keep playing kindergarten telephone operator and parroting hearsay?
Cause the quotable stuff there...disagrees with what people are saying.
Maybe I missed somebody quoting something. I did a search with the forum search for "Heretic" and looked through the posts since these notes went live.
Um, the 12 hour missions (as currently implement) DO reward less XP on a per-hour basis than comparable missions - that is, same mission rareness, which don't give items as rewards.
http://i.imgur.com/0KMlESf.png
Dividing the 12 hour missions by 10 would result in them being worse than uncommon missions of shorter duration. Not even on a relative level - on an absolute level, they would give fewer xp.
Here he acknowledges that his standalone game he is developing based on his ideas for the Duty Officer system is designed to be played once or twice a day.
It seems rather cruel to expect me to go digging through notes on a system I disagree with Heretic implementation of when I fundamentally do agree with Borticus and Geko's ideas for changes just to make me backup my claim that Borticus and Geko's changes represent a different design philosophy rather than a true bugfix. Because even when I find the posts (and they exist) saying that DOffing was designed to penalize too frequently or too infrequently and supporting the idea that the multiplier is NOT a big, my position is STILL that I wouldn't necessarily stick with Heretic's vision in STO if I had my druthers.
My stance is legitimately that I support (cautious) changes to the system but that it is considerably more complex than Geko and Borticus are making it out to be. Which doesn't mean I still don't support yanking out the heart of the system's design and replacing it. I feel like my stance isn't being taken at face value when somebody asks me to prove it. I'm being asked to dig up dirt against a nerf I have no essential problem with as long as it's plainly labeled as a nerf.
Another post, indicating that full time DOffing is intended to be roughly 50% the XP of playing for the same amount of time and a meaningful supplement to play.
Right, but in reading that...
Somebody actively DOFFs for an hour, that should provide "mildly better than 50%" the return as if they were playing other content for half an hour.
That's not a case of spending 5-10 minutes to set some DOFF assignments. Cause that 5-10 minutes would be the actual play...so the expectation for 5-10 minutes would be just "mildly better than 50%" meaning somewhere between 2.5-5 minutes or so of actual play.
He even states there that it very well may need to be reigned in because of potentially providing better than intended returns.
Course, he left around 8 months later.
But yeah, if I play an hour a day where all I'm doing is DOFFing...based on what he said there, it would take me mildly less than twice as long as somebody playing an hour a day that was doing stuff. And somebody that worked the DOFFing into what they were doing, would see a better return than somebody that didn't.
That particular post just points to those particular assignments being that much more overrewarding than first suggested.
I have tried explaining to everyone many times over. Mine are in fact 100% from the referral program. Cryptic won't look into it anyways. I have tried for over a year. Only response I get from cryptic support is that "referral items are one time only unlocks, anyone that says otherwise is not telling the truth." Or from most players, "referral rewards can be reclaimed in the c-store"
Thanks for the info though, I don't remember mine being boxed, but I do know they are from the referral program.
Bet you all are the ones that complain when they give free stuff to everyone.
If you not happy, stop playing, take a break or something, cause seriously, with all the complaining you all do, you rub off on people and spread your negativity and im half expecting the devs will do something in retaliation to all of us because you people cant just have your say and then drop it and move on like adults do, no, gotta carry on like children....grow up. You had your say, now drop it!
21 pages and growing. Do you all think they are going to change their minds? With the name calling, borderline abuse,accusations, and what nots, do you all really, honestly think they will change their minds with the way you guys are treating them??
If i was a forum moderator, some of you would be banned.
Cue the white knight remarks :P
Wow, great solution. "Ban all the whiners"
Makes for an effective method to ensure that no one is pressuring anyone for things to get fixed.
Fleet Defiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support | Fleet Manticore Kinetic Strike Ship | Tactical Command Kinetic Siege Refit | Fleet Defiant Quantum Phase Escort | Fleet Valiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support
Turning the Galaxy-X into a Torpedo Dreadnought & torpedo tutorial, with written torpedo guide.
"A good weapon and a great strategy will win you many battles." - Marshall
I knew using Kinetics would be playing the game on hard mode, but what I didn't realize was how bad the deck is stacked against Kinetics.
If they'd gone through with the forum transfer...would have gotten very quiet.
1) When you bring out these fixes, we're flat out called cheaters. Every. Single. Time. It's never 'This isn't in line with our skill curve' or 'This isn't balanced to the way we feel things should be played'. It's always "You guys are exploiting, you should have KNOWN this isn't how we want you to play!" - and it's getting really insulting and really old, really fast.
2) This is the important one. For players like me - this change is an annoyance, but it won't bother me. My main is fairly heavily invested in the spec trees, he can craft manuals for alts. He can play with the fun kit modules. But for new players - the new potential hardcore players who want to pvp, or want to get in the 80k plus club... They're so far behind they might as well head to ToR now. With the 12 hour missions - they could potentially have their primary skill tree filled in a month. Now, if they don't have 18 hours a day to invest in killing the same mobs over and over and over - they're finished. They can never catch up to us 'cheaters' who ran 12 hour doff missions, or went to Argala.
They are behind, and no matter how hard they try to catch up, us 'cheaters' will be that far ahead in the new skill trees. The new powers. Little Suzy who wants to come in and get into PVP - she not only behind in gear, but she's also two spec trees in power behind everyone else. And these trees DO give an advantage. Passive health, turn, weapons, resistances. The spec trees are powerful, and she can't catch up. There's no feasible way for her to 'grind' and catch up. Doffing is just about useless after this change and everything else trickles the xp.
Cryptic - you guys need to look at some other games and think about this. Your competitors are giving players ways to play to skip all the boring BS and just run the fun missions. Your competitors have enough content that there's no 'grinding one map for 8 hours just to see the next story mission'.
I've been here since Beta. I'm not going anywhere. I love the game - and while I might be frustrated, I'm sticking it out. But for anyone new - for anyone considering picking this up - you might as well be asking them to climb Mount Everest instead of 'play a game'.
Now this next part is where you're hurting yourself where older players are involved. Those of us who are invested in Intel or Command or Pilot - those of us who have bought ships on a whim because we could fill the spec tree and get absolutely everything out of them... When your new spec trees and new ships come out - instead of a cash register, all you'll hear is a universal "/meh. I can use what I have now."
Yea that one got me puzzled a bit. I mean empty queue lists are nothing new since Delta Rising but I made the unfortunate mistakes of taking a look at running games after a Dirext X crash to desktop forced me to try to get back to my team after the game decided to put me out of the PvE map uppon relogging.
Did not take me long to find it because only 1 dozen PvE machtes seemed to have been running in all of STO.
Am I reading it wrong or is PvE as dead as PvP?
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
"Advanced now fails if the team does not save a single transport in phase 2.
Numbers have been adjusted to provide the same as, or rewards greater than previous.
Advanced mentions player must save one to pass."
It seems to me that you just need to save one transport to make it. how in the world is this a nerf ?
Thats all fine and good. Im just trying to find out why participation in some maps seem to approach a new low. They can have me save as many transport as they want for all I care, Im just unlikely to play it when I get three times the outcome on other maps doing them via toon hops in the same time. But then again, the new ground one gets the mark nerf now accordingly.
Im confident Cryptic has balanced the rewards by the time Im done with that reput on 9 toons. As far as marks are concerned this could very well be before this patch goes even live on Thursday.
Only time will tell which of the 3 new maps will be used in the long run by the community. As far as design is concerned they got us some cool variety. One Space DPS feast, one low DPS although heavily time gated map and a cool ground one which turned out to be one of my most favourite maps to date.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
I see it working like this.
1 doff for a one hour mission of less is 100 SPXP
Additional doff multiples mission by .25 per doff
2 hour mission base x2
4 hour mission base x3
8 hour mission base x4
12 hour mission base x5
24 hour mission base x6
72 hour mission base x10
So if you have a 12 hour mission and 5 doffs on it you would earn 625 SPXP
Then base success vs crit
While the devs are fixing this they can also fix the areas that are not rewarding SPXP for enemy kills! Kabali Ground 53-57 areas. Vicious Cycle Elite, and Gates of Gre'Thor.
All it is is a delay until the entire problem get fixed.