Been following some of the many podcasts and...

oldkhemaraa

Got some thoughts as I've learned just a bit more about whats happening under the hood. Please be aware I come from an old tabletop and minitures gaming backround. My gamer nerd days about about 1970..way before nerd was really that cool, and tended to involve slide rules) I even recall a game that came with a custom made slide rule that was used to calculate hit chance with percentile die or if you were really nerdy, and HP scientific calculator with a random number function that worked. I was a way differnt world then.

So, I'm listing to Sarcasm Detectors latest vid on Youtube and going to self. "so how is it there is this magic bucket in the first place" when dealing with energy in the games systems.. the EPS bucket... and power transfers mechanics that can essentially be made pretty bottomless from the sound of it?

Doesn't this kind of defeat the entire concept of having a limited power pool in the first place? Power/energy management has been a very central theme to Star trek combat simulations. Some titles have opted for a single bucket that everything is fed out of.. Propultion, weapons, shield and other systems. Others have separated the different systems, and other still, such as STO have a mixed system with minimums and maximums in each catagory.

In SD's vid what he was hearing is that in STO there is apparently this invisible energy bucket that apparently doesn't have a limit to whats in it that is driven by the power transfer mechanic and that can be manipulated in such a way as to apparently deliver more power to systems then it seems the ships are supposed to have. (specifically weapons power as his vid was all about boosting DPS output into the fare the well zone.) I suppose the same mechanic would work just as well if pointed to say Aux power which is the big exotic damage generator for Science powers.

More importantly.. I think it strongly falls into the not only being an "undocumented" feature, but very possibly also an unintended one. And I'm thinking this is one the Dev team may not have realized was happening.

Look at what we do know.. First off over the last several years the dev team members have said time and time again.."there are diminishing returns" when it comes to console effects.. yet, It appears that that not all console types are effected by this, so in a lot of top end builds you see stacked consoles...If you recall the Twitch caste this last week with Aron Eisenberg we all got to see his cheesy (very fine fine cheese by the buy) in house build with all epic consoles.. I noticed his TAC consoles were all the same type. And yes of course they were epic quality.. but still.. the in house build that they gave him seemed to violate what Cryptic has been telling us all along diminishing returns.

So whats the truth any more about stacking console, diminishing returns, invisible energy pools which can be manipulated to the point where you no longer have any sort of energy drop off as far as weapons? What happened to this so called balance?

I'm a war gamer.. Balance is not just about PvP, or PvE its about what you can do, and what you can't. If you make something to powerfull you upset the entire balance of the game. And if you have systems and mechanic that can be exploited beyond the limitations and caps that need to be in place, then you got a problem. SO far I watched a number of vids over the last few months educating myself on the nuances of STO space combat mechanics, and what I am seeing bothers me. Players have been pushing DPS output up higher and higher and higher with out check. Now right off the bat I don't trust any of the DPS parsers..they don't really report all damage that is sourced from player actions, but I'm seeing burst damage numbers that are insane high. Now as for numbers to have meaning I need to know more about them.. specificly how they are being reported.. Are the DPS number a peak number, or is it the sustained damage output average? If its a peak numbers.. I'm hearing 50k out there which is pretty high, may be to high. If 50k is a sustained number.. a damage out put a players could slam out constantly over say a 10 minute period, then its actually a bit more worrisome. Because if 50k is their average.. what are these same player peaking at?

Either Cryptic is going to have to create a whole new mechanic for elite boss mobs to even be a challenge to players like this, or the studios math and system guys are going to have to find a way to reign those number in. The numbers creep is only going to get worse.

What got my attentions in SD's vid was that he was able to push his "power transfer rate" over 400% What that translates to is quite simply a player emulating this sort of build is never ever going to have a damage output drop off due to power draw down. Not only does this feel like a borked mechanic to me.. I don't have the math skills to explain it, BUt it feels remarkably less and less trek. Always in the shows, the movies.. "I need more power!" And the engineers says "you've got all I have!" to here in STO we have players who can now give thier ships unlimited power.. where is the power coming from? Same place it always has, the warp core, or in Romulan ships, the singularity. We seem to be able to transfer more power then we generate. If players can plug in console that can increase the power transfer rate by such a degree...um, why isn't that built into the ship in the first place?

I don't think the high DPS numbers we're seeing these day were by design.. Maybe if this were Magic the Gathering I could see it (I've met the mathmatician that put it all together..I'm a bright guys, but this guys exuded "Smart", nice fellow though!)

Well, mule flogged, off to other things..

Unknown

This content has been removed.

oldkhemaraa

Yep, I realize some do, and some don't.. It's..... irritating, that the number are not right up front where you can see them.. I'll bet the starfleet doesn't have to go through this esoteric TRIBBLE (and I do mean TRIBBLE!)... I utterly despise hidden game mechanics and systems, that have no obvious way to tell whats going on. If this studio going to give us a system that had numbers and obvious math, Then the math needs to be stated and clear, the rules known. There are good reasons for this. First off, if some one is exploiting or cheating/hacking in any way It gets obvious fast. If the math and formula's had been known, I'm pretty sure the Double shield exploit the Borti uncovered and exposed back when STOked was a video blog would have been caught and corrected without a rather painful and very public "Yo Cryptic, Dude's it Broken! And here is the proof ya'll been ignoring."

*sigh*

I suppose the real reason that so many studio to not tell when it comes to this stuff is either misplaced pride, or embarrassment if the users figure out you have NOT been cooking with gas! If players know the internal math OPENLY
then you end up with a system that fair to anyone who can mange a wee bit of number crunching.

Ship combat and the related systems has always felt like a well muddied mess. It's not fair to the games, its shown its self a number of times to be prone to not just errors, but compounding errors. I'd like to see diminishing returns across the board, and more internal hard caps.

Maybe if they threw in an internal system where the harder you push your systems for increased performance, the greater the chance of a system failing due to overloading that particular system... That 400% increase in EPS flow rating is a case in point... If someone running numbers that high..

Mister Scott "Captain, I canna push that much power through the systems or they'll blow!"

Reign it in Cryptic, but do in in a way that makes sense in "Trek" science.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

e30ernest

To be fair, I see the invisible bucket off energy as your unused warp core energy. You are basically dropping down power levels from other systems and rerouting that energy to weapons. That leaves you with a lot of excess energy that gets transferred faster to your weapons by more efficient EPS systems.

Now as far as ships not coming with the best EPS systems or other consoles, it isn't unusual for ship officers to modify their ships to make it better in the shows. LaForge did it with Enterprise, Tucker did it with the NX, Torres And Seven did it in Voyager and Miles did it in the Defiant.

As far as DPS, it's sustained player damage over the engagement. That's why faster runs generally show higher
DPS numbers. Not only did they deal higher damage and kill enemies faster, their burst damage also brings that number up due to the short run.

You are right, the power creep is real and could be a problem in the long run . However, it's what earns Cryptic money, so I don't expect that to change soon.

Sorry for the typos, this forum isn't mobile friendly and I'm typing this with my son jumping on my back.

oldkhemaraa

Ha! At least YOUR typos have an excuse!

pweistheworst

e30ernest wrote: »

You are right, the power creep is real and could be a problem in the long run . However, it's what earns Cryptic money, so I don't expect that to change soon.

You speak the truth.

Every new "season" of content includes baddies with power creep to make them more of a challenge; now people complain about the Iconian Heralds, before that it was the Vaadwaur, before that it was the Undine, before that it was the Elachi, etc.

With each new content update the devs give us tougher enemies and that helps sell new ships, the power creep helps sell lockbox keys for new ships/consoles/weapons, and helps motivate players to spend more time crafting or grinding in-game currency to buy new stuff to strengthen our ships or ground combat.

All the new stuff adds to the complexity of the math dictating our powers/buffs and that contributes to the original problem described in this thread ... mechanics that might not be "broken" but certainly aren't "working as originally intended."

I too listen to podcasts and several devs who spoke as guests on Priority One have mentioned the frustration of the power/buff system and how it continues to get more complex and suffers from more bugs as new things (new traits, consoles, weapons, abilities, etc.) are added to the game.

The devs aren't going to stop "all" power creep because it is important to keeping the game profitable, but they probably will do something sooner or later about the unintentional or "accidental" power creep that comes from the ridiculous complexities dictating game mechanics.

stobg2015

pweistheworst wrote: »

The devs aren't going to stop "all" power creep because it is important to keeping the game profitable, but they probably will do something sooner or later about the unintentional or "accidental" power creep that comes from the ridiculous complexities dictating game mechanics.

No, I don't believe they will.

I do give them props for trying to fix the worst issues with individual powers and dealing with unintended side-effects of power interactions. It's not completely ignored. But I don't see them ever making much headway in simplifying those complexities you're talking about. It would affect the bottom line too much to limit their options in playing with the game's "fiddly bits".

And if they ever did "fix" it, you can be sure they'd break the system again within six months adding something else. I'm not trying to dog them here. But we all know how Cryptic operates by now and it shouldn't be a surprise that they release stuff with good intentions and not a lot of community testing.

Sano

The simple truth is that powercreep sales AND that a majority of the players cant actually use it. The traits abilities doffs boffs ships and whatever they released since delta rising easily doubled avg dps for good players knowing how to use this stuff to maximum effect while the standard player can be lucky if he gets a small 10% boost out of the same money/ec-investment.
Thats also the reason cryptic can keep doing it because most ppl cant or wont use all the power creep. They just give a damn about the few who actually left the usual state of having-no-clue-whatsoever behind and with it all challange the game ever may have provided.

woodwhity

To answer your underlying question: Yes, the game is poorly programmed and since the Dev-team changed a few times, none of them have everything in the game on their radar, hence some players have more knowledge of mechanics than the ones who program the functions.
I think it was Geko was the one who made this very clear for everyone, when he said in an interview that he doesnt know how players can do more than 10k, let alone more than 100k. With the record at 12x k dps and hundreds of players over 50k.

Why? Because powercreep sells. Even though only 20-30% of the playerbase can actually use that right.

And there is only one infinite bucket of energy, that is weaponenergy. Before the moar-energy and moar-drainresistence-stuff, it was actually funny to watch that a vesta with normal DHCs would out-dps a vesta with aux-DHCs, since the latter couldnt use overcapping and reduced aux-energy, which in turn reduced the power of sci-skills. It was one of the failed experiments they tried. Another one would be the dyson-destroyer, having a weapon on bord that could only be used when you turned it into a weaker escort. Most of their experiments could have been saved from failure if they had asked skilled players how to tweak it to make them competetive.

Sano

Well at least they watch our vids from time to time so we do have a way of showing them what the stuff they make is actually capable of. They just wont admit to it cause they think they would "loose face" when it actually would help make their decisions more effective/less buggy/less super-op but if they keep measuring what something does based on their own skills well just login to see where that gets us.