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Monetizing Accolades.
vsilverwings1
Member Posts: 572 Arc User
Really Cryptic?
I usually reserve my criticism of the game, quietly moan to myself and friends, find ways to minimise the impact or altogether and occasionally generally chip in my approval or disapproval of certain features and let the more active forum members bring consensus. Accolades though has always been special to me and it's always been a reason to continue playing STO so when that gets brought up I feel I need to defend it when admittedly much of the community probably isn't that fussed.
To put things in perspective, literally just before 10.5 came out I was ready to have a long hard think about my time in STO (no this isn't an I quit thread because I'm LTS). I've gone from 8 characters to 4 and so far been able to do pretty much everything on each of them but I simply can't afford the time, effort and resources as real life develops. I feel 100% of my time in STO is to grind and if I stopped trying to achieve the aim of the grind the grind itself would be utterly pointless, I'd in effect have no reason to play STO short of logging on every season to do the new content then log off. So I sat down and agreed with myself what I'd do on each of my 'mains' and what I'd not do. Accolades was to be the few things I'd keep going on my 4 characters among in game grinds like reputation but lockbox and other monetary stuff, no, just on the one character.
The new lockbox comes out and someone mentioned an accolade(s) being tied to it. A small part of me wondered if he was pulling my leg but a big part of me a/trusted him not to pull that stunt and b/I knew we were dealing with Cryptic. Sure enough we have an accolade for completing all 10 assignments and what a surprise one for criting all 10. To make this clear at best I'm getting 29% crit chance. The only saving grace of this accolade is you can buy them off the exchange and you can buy specific ones. This though is of little comfort when the chance of criting is so low.
Now I'd have thought monetising accolades wasn't that profitable given the number of people who achieve them. Ships and abilities, yes I can get that but accolades? Surely you'd have realised this from the Khellid fiasco. Of the accolade community I ask you how many actually went and spent hundreds of millions of ec or opened boxes to complete that? Since then every similar lockbox has had us speculating "Will Cryptic pull that one again?" and until now, no. To me this really smacks of desperation and money grabbing particularly the criting one. Must you be so desperate and/or greedy to make money you have to pick on the relatively small accolade community? I can bet you that the community will fall in to 2 main categories,
One could probably count the number who'd open lock boxes for this accolade one one hand.
To buy all 10 isn't that bad but to crit all 10? You could be looking at much, much more and may never complete it. I used to get every accolade until Khellids came along and committed to doing that only once, this will be no different and I'm certainly not going to open lockboxes.
I knew it was only a matter of time until Cryptic decided to stick it to me, to anyone. Given time you'll find something someone cares about and TRIBBLE with it. PVP, T5 ships...now it's the turn of accolades. I can only hope that Cryptic and PWE is in serious trouble financially if it's getting to this point and call it a rant if you will but I'm come to accept this from Cryptic and PWE. Server issues, bugs, monetising, grind, nerfs...that's why I'm passionate enough to make my voice heard but not the fury to rant, I just couldn't maintain that.
So I'll do my best to complete these accolades on one character using only ec and not give any actual money. I hope you act on your words of 'we listen' but experience tells me otherwise, not when it comes to money.
I usually reserve my criticism of the game, quietly moan to myself and friends, find ways to minimise the impact or altogether and occasionally generally chip in my approval or disapproval of certain features and let the more active forum members bring consensus. Accolades though has always been special to me and it's always been a reason to continue playing STO so when that gets brought up I feel I need to defend it when admittedly much of the community probably isn't that fussed.
To put things in perspective, literally just before 10.5 came out I was ready to have a long hard think about my time in STO (no this isn't an I quit thread because I'm LTS). I've gone from 8 characters to 4 and so far been able to do pretty much everything on each of them but I simply can't afford the time, effort and resources as real life develops. I feel 100% of my time in STO is to grind and if I stopped trying to achieve the aim of the grind the grind itself would be utterly pointless, I'd in effect have no reason to play STO short of logging on every season to do the new content then log off. So I sat down and agreed with myself what I'd do on each of my 'mains' and what I'd not do. Accolades was to be the few things I'd keep going on my 4 characters among in game grinds like reputation but lockbox and other monetary stuff, no, just on the one character.
The new lockbox comes out and someone mentioned an accolade(s) being tied to it. A small part of me wondered if he was pulling my leg but a big part of me a/trusted him not to pull that stunt and b/I knew we were dealing with Cryptic. Sure enough we have an accolade for completing all 10 assignments and what a surprise one for criting all 10. To make this clear at best I'm getting 29% crit chance. The only saving grace of this accolade is you can buy them off the exchange and you can buy specific ones. This though is of little comfort when the chance of criting is so low.
Now I'd have thought monetising accolades wasn't that profitable given the number of people who achieve them. Ships and abilities, yes I can get that but accolades? Surely you'd have realised this from the Khellid fiasco. Of the accolade community I ask you how many actually went and spent hundreds of millions of ec or opened boxes to complete that? Since then every similar lockbox has had us speculating "Will Cryptic pull that one again?" and until now, no. To me this really smacks of desperation and money grabbing particularly the criting one. Must you be so desperate and/or greedy to make money you have to pick on the relatively small accolade community? I can bet you that the community will fall in to 2 main categories,
- Those with expendable income to buy them with ec off the exchange because those people opening don't care about accolades.
- Those that either won't justify the cost or don't have the resources to fund that kind of grind.
One could probably count the number who'd open lock boxes for this accolade one one hand.
To buy all 10 isn't that bad but to crit all 10? You could be looking at much, much more and may never complete it. I used to get every accolade until Khellids came along and committed to doing that only once, this will be no different and I'm certainly not going to open lockboxes.
I knew it was only a matter of time until Cryptic decided to stick it to me, to anyone. Given time you'll find something someone cares about and TRIBBLE with it. PVP, T5 ships...now it's the turn of accolades. I can only hope that Cryptic and PWE is in serious trouble financially if it's getting to this point and call it a rant if you will but I'm come to accept this from Cryptic and PWE. Server issues, bugs, monetising, grind, nerfs...that's why I'm passionate enough to make my voice heard but not the fury to rant, I just couldn't maintain that.
So I'll do my best to complete these accolades on one character using only ec and not give any actual money. I hope you act on your words of 'we listen' but experience tells me otherwise, not when it comes to money.
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They just want to maximize profit, and if people fall for such an obvious attempt, frankly, the people deserve it.
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My beef isn't exactly how expensive it will be for me, it's the principal and also those that have strived to get every accolade will now have to pay up or lose out. Others who are passionate about accolades I've spoken to have already said in less than nice terms they won't touch it. That's their choice, I'll at least try and know others will too.
My beef is that Cryptic have now resorted to what I imagine to be a very small part of the STO community to get more profit and if their scraping this low it must be bad (low enough priority to not fix them when they don't work or break). To even take it to the point you need to crit all of them makes it crystal clear it's not just how can they make money but more/most money out of a feature in STO that is hardly the most money making feature in STO.
Edit - It's impossible to find the old post, but it was out there. The dev said they would stay away from putting accolades in lockboxes because the community didn't like having them tied to paid content. Since they conveniently made it impossible to find said post, now they can go back and do it again.
This might be the impossible-to-find post you're referencing.
I didn't want to link accolades with content as that's debatable if Cryptic considers it content even if we did.
Excellent find. Now Cryptic can say they reserve the right to change things (that's a fact of MMOs) and as it's a dev one wonders if they'll think twice about saying anything for fear of being called out on it later. That's the risk though but they can also say this isn't like the Khellids because 'reasons'.
While Borticus did point out that the Khellid Wrangler accolade was negatively received, it wasn't specifically mentioned they would not tie accolades to lockboxes again.
Just that it might be a bad idea if they did.
Which... given this current controversy, yeah. He'd still be right in that we've still not warmed up to the idea of accolades tied to a lockbox.
I've not even been able to find these assignments on the exchange. Either they're bind-on-pickup (like Dilithium claims), or I'm not entering in the right search parameters to find them.
Well spoken. Not sure if you meant to imply Cryptic likes acting on ideas they themselves have called bad, I'd not put it past them.
Look up "Temporal Research Assignment" under 'All' and you'll find them.
They usually stay away from absolutions in their communication.
Also, thanks for the heads up. The dev blog says they were called "Temporal Investigations" so naturally that's what I tried searching for. Doing a search for just "Temporal" was 400 Temporal Lockboxes and... yeah, so that's helpful.
And yet, we are forced to spend money yet again on not one, but two accolades. The second one being left to the RNG gods who have failed me 3 times already on 4 assignments with 27%+ crit chance.
Bad ideas are always bad. Adding some bonuses into the accolade doesn't make it any better than last time, because in the end, it's still paying $$$ for an accolade.
It isn’t the first time they don’t stay truthful to what they say. By doing so they manage one new low after the other.
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As far as represented odds are concerned I’m not at all surprised here. I doff 1-2 times a day on 9 toons so at least 23x9 assignments. The outcome estimation feels terribly off specifically on assignments you seem to gain a lot from.
I think I manage a fail estimation in a low one number % range on fleet mining assignments for example. And that 9 times a day. The outcome in reality for the past 2 months is 15-25% fails. Confiscate contraband from crew has similar discrepancies between estimation and reality.
It has been mentioned that the doff systems will be “normalized” in the future. Tinkering with important missions could simply be the path the Devs have chosen here. At least failure is a word the customers of this title should be well used to.
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I've said it before and I'll say it again even if it always falls on deaf ears (even if supposedly the devs read this). The whole doff assignments RNG chances seem to have gotten screwed up either at launch of season 6 or shortly afterwards. Before season 6 it worked 100% fine. Someone probably did one of those "behind the scenes" changes that they don't communicate (Remember the mail system change fiasco?) and since most people don't keep tabs on how many doff missions they complete/fail/crit, nobody noticed, so they left the change in even if it sucks.
Was reminded the Khellid rewards were 1 lobi but couldn't remember if they were told would be 'free' or just unlocked.
With other stuff like the armada/holdings tab broken when it was at least functional before let's give Cryptic a pat on the back for maintaining their standards of code.
It's the dev's idea of "free". Pay a lobi tax for your "free" item.