Maintenance is exclusively to get you to buy more ships - for the whales out there, want to start a new project every 30 minutes 25 hours a day, you need every ship in the entire game.
As far as lore goes mostly everyone got it completely backwards. Names, places, lore of planets or counting number of torpedo projectiles left on voyager season 2, has no meaning.
The themes of every episode are absolutely disconnected from the lore. Or in other words, lore geeks completely misunderstand star trek. Yes it is semi sci-geek but the message is actual philosophical, political and psychological etc.
We don't need to know the name of the planet, rather simply to understand the underlying theme is racism, for example.
Voyager was a terrible show.
The premise was great though, in where this crew would have to face moral dilemma (1up lore geeks) in a survial situation.
I find that every single character on that show so shallow and emotional immature, it angers me.
The immature klingon with the immature boyfriend? Harry kim? Over the top immature. Neelix and his girlfriend - who was litterly written AS a kid, the list goes on and on. Seven of nine again a child character only it was so un-intelligently written, it was an insult to children.
I didn't realize just how many ships I had available (collected) from playing through years, till I started this new system...
.. 63
And there were several "Special Event" Ships I didn't bother to earn through the years.
And that's just on my Delta Recruit.
I haven't even looked as to how many my Original Toon has available yet.
wow
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
honestly they should just make the assignments longer and reduce the "maintenance" times cause if someone is going to go and map out an alien region of space. i'm sure its going to take a bit longer than 15 mins >_> id be much happier if a mission took longer than just having my ships sat doing nothing i mean at the moment they spend a good 100 times longer in maintenance than actually doing stuff and even then there is no real mission report on whats happening on these missions that require these maintenance periods. as someone already said why do you need a huge maintenance period for taking crew to shore leave, i mean why even bother having assignments like that. honestly the system feels so half-assed with no immersion factor at the moment as if it was just shoe-horned in at the last minute. i can see soooo many things they could have done to improve this and make the whole system more in depth.
for example why couldnt you send a ship out to explore for a set period and you could go and check up on its progress and have like what they do in some other games where you have a kinda log they fill in every so often i.e.: came across some steller phenomena and decided to study it. then 5 mins later they were successful and received a small assortment of R&D mats and when they get back from there extended excursion THEN you can put that maintenance on if they really wanted as they may have gotten attacked and recived some damage out there. but my god its a hell of alot better still than " click, click, wait, collect wait alot longer and off it goes again."
so your answer to maintenance is to make the missions last longer and tie up valuable mission slots that could be used on alternative missions with ships that are not on cooldown while the ships you are so worried about are on cooldown, makes sense.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
.... And STO cannot live without a weekly maintenance. (so what about a Starship way more complex than a mere PC game?)
If you are trying to justify the cooldown, put it that way, it is NOT because the assignment get completed in 15 mins or 3 hours 30 mins for YOUR convenience that the ship actually travels and does the job so fast. The assignment should take a week, but you get the result and the reward way faster.
Stop complaining and play the game the way it is designed to be played. All players have to bear with Admiralty cooldowns...Well maintenance.
Maintenance is exclusively to get you to buy more ships - for the whales out there, want to start a new project every 30 minutes 25 hours a day, you need every ship in the entire game.
As far as lore goes mostly everyone got it completely backwards. Names, places, lore of planets or counting number of torpedo projectiles left on voyager season 2, has no meaning.
The themes of every episode are absolutely disconnected from the lore. Or in other words, lore geeks completely misunderstand star trek. Yes it is semi sci-geek but the message is actual philosophical, political and psychological etc.
We don't need to know the name of the planet, rather simply to understand the underlying theme is racism, for example.
Voyager was a terrible show.
The premise was great though, in where this crew would have to face moral dilemma (1up lore geeks) in a survial situation.
I find that every single character on that show so shallow and emotional immature, it angers me.
The immature klingon with the immature boyfriend? Harry kim? Over the top immature. Neelix and his girlfriend - who was litterly written AS a kid, the list goes on and on. Seven of nine again a child character only it was so un-intelligently written, it was an insult to children.
Here's exactly what I liked about Voyager:
1. Tim Russ. Excellent Vulcan. He channeled Nimoy brilliantly.
2. Robert Picardo. Excellent ***hole. He owned every scene he was in. His taking command of the Prometheus was probably the high point of the series for me. Yes, even with Andy TRIBBLE in the room.
3. Opening theme music. Best since TMP.
4. Sulu's return. Crappy episode though. Still .... Sulu.
That's all I can think of. The show was a total waste of 6.8 years of film. Would rather watch the final season of Enterprise ad nauseum.
As I already said in another thread, "maintenance" is perhaps not the right word for the ship cooldown. The cooldown would be better though of as including all the things ships in Star Trek commonly do in addition to missions the admiralty sends them on. Distress calls, anomalies of the week, alien attacks, gratuitous time travel hijinks, etc.
Did we ever have that in the series, maintenance? Hey guys, today we have no adventure for you. The starship is on maintenance, the crew is on leave, so besides some commercials we have a black screen for you to watch. Realise, it looks a lot like space. Have fun.
Kidding. I was the other day wondering, how long can starships without support? I would say forever, if the crew has all the competence to make repairs.
Well, we did have the one where the Enterprise-D went for a "baryon sweep" (go to Wikipedia, look up "baryon," see how embarrassingly bad the science is there), except that the maintenance cycle did not go as planned so there was an adventure anyway.
We also had one where the NX-01 stopped at a repair station that wasn't all it appeared to be.
Oh, and I can think of a few times maintenance on DS9 caused problems, like tripping a Cardassian anti-rebellion system, or trying to go raiding for parts on Empok Nor, which backfired.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Presumably, the ships do need regular maintenance like every complex piece of machinery, but unless there's something interesting going on they don't show that on TV.
Presumably, the ships do need regular maintenance like every complex piece of machinery, but unless there's something interesting going on they don't show that on TV.
Yeah...what we see of maintenance on TV is typically maintenance gone wrong. Just imagine the cooldown time resulting from some of those incidents.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Head canon all you want. Maintenance time is a time gate to keep you from over collecting the rewards.
Sure there is a "draw" to make money (buy more ships), but if they reduce the maintenance times, they need to nerf rewards.
Well, sure. I don't believe anyone disputes that. However, it would be more accurate/thematically better to have the missions take longer and just get rid of the maintenance period IMO. Or just make maintenance required infrequently (after x number of assignments completed) if they really must keep it.
I agree it would make the most sense--especially since you are likely putting your best ships on the missions with the highest requirements, which should be more involved and take the most time. So you'd likely still have your best ships sidelined the longest. Unless of course you send a Vesta on a mission alone.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
I would have by far preferred an Admiralty System that allowed me to command a fleet in battle to what we got.
Now don't get me wrong: DOffs were a brilliant innovation. However, I fail to see the point of two game systems that accomplish the same goals. In my opinion, the missions could have been built instead for a DOff Assignment upgrade, as in, "What do you do once you hit Level 4?"
The cooldowns are basically irrelevant. Time gating is a part of DOffing already, because each assignment or mission takes time to accomplish. With a portion of the time devoted to 'maintenance' you simply open up mission slots faster than if the assignment merely lasted longer, and those with more ships, and more play time to assign them, benefit more because that is the design intent of the system.
So, enjoy DOffing 2.0 for all it's worth, and accept that time gating is going to happen.
Head canon all you want. Maintenance time is a time gate to keep you from over collecting the rewards.
Sure there is a "draw" to make money (buy more ships), but if they reduce the maintenance times, they need to nerf rewards.
Well, sure. I don't believe anyone disputes that. However, it would be more accurate/thematically better to have the missions take longer and just get rid of the maintenance period IMO. Or just make maintenance required infrequently (after x number of assignments completed) if they really must keep it.
I know this could sound bad, but having the missions take longer removes the advantage of having a lot of ships and playing the system well. If you don't try for 100% chance of completion all the time and have a large roster of ships you can flip more missions. This nets more rewards and encourages the ship sales. maintenance time should just be renamed if the ONLY problem is a head canon thematic.
Not going into show vs game, just from a game standpoint the cool downs are WAAAYY too long. Needs to be atleast 50% shorter.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
Head canon all you want. Maintenance time is a time gate to keep you from over collecting the rewards.
Sure there is a "draw" to make money (buy more ships), but if they reduce the maintenance times, they need to nerf rewards.
Or they could move the maintenence time and add it to the project time instead.
Same thing in terms of time but you could at least send the same ships straight back out again.
My 2c
Not the same thing, since there is only a limited number of slots. If you got 1 hour assignment and 18 hour cooldown you can send your OTHER ships out after an hour, as opposed to hogging the slot until the next day.
But then that's the true core of this argument isn't it. People being jealous that other people have more ships and thus can do more assignments.
Yes, there is a slight gameplay and story segregation here, but for what's it worth...
Gameplay wise it is of course a bottleneck for the rewards, which could be mitigated by buying more ships. This makes sense from a commercial and gameplay point of view. I am quite relaxed about this since I do not usually log on more than once a day and - while the rewards are indeed probably too large and I expect a nerf in one form or the other - they don't give anything I really really desperately need here and now. But I see how it could be annoying if you had to leave slots open after a couple of hours of gameplay with regular new mission starts. I still do think that the diminishing returns on time spent in the game (maintenance times, cooldown on lucrative doff missions, daily bonus marks) is not only good for the company (you will come back regularily instead of binge playing if you're after the rewards) but also for players, because getting less after a while of gameplay may make you think about doing something else.
But about "maintenance" - as has been said, this is not only the ship being in drydock completely analysed. You will need to check up a machine as often as possible, since any failure could be disastrous. So in our world, every commercial airplane will get maintenance after each and every trip, it just happens to be while people are boarding. But yes, there are technicians checking vital parts of the plane more or less every second it spends on the airport. In the military, vehicles, especially ships, planes and helicopters, will be checked at every possible moment. Sometimes, especially in the past, ships had to go for a long while not being able to be checked in a port, but guess what the sailors did while on sea? Checking the sails for holes, caulking and so on. All the time. Ships that went too long without maintenance would still work somehow and be at risk of complete failure. (The German expression for that is "Seelenverkäufer" - soul seller)
And yes, the Voyager was probably in that kind of situation - lack of proper repairs, improvised materials and so on - because there simply was no option of just going to a spacedock. That doesn't mean it would break down immediately, but it would mean that the risk was growing. And still there will be maintenance all the time. The fact that we didn't see it on screen is just that a real space farer's life would be boring most of the time - waiting, eating, sleeping, doing some repairs in your section, repeat - an not make for good TV. Just as the fact that we do not see them use the toilet on screen doesn't mean they held it all in for 7 years.
The relation of mission time to maintenance time is still not really lore friendly, though - even though in real life some vehicles (helicopters in adverse regions as an example) actually do spend more time getting checked and repaired than on an actual mission, it rarely would be by a factor of 20 or so.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
I'll suggest it again, if you feel the maintenance times are to long, ask for a complete it now button so players can spend dil to go around the maintenance cool down.
What I find disappointing is that this ground of forced time-gating and pay to get around has already been tread and shown to be a poor way to entice customers - https://youtube.com/watch?v=hQtFo_E_Ea0, especially @3:18
A better model is to incentivize, not penalize. Imagine if "maintenance" periods were means of beefing up your card, either to get it to the full stats or to get some bonus to stats, but if you really wanted to you could interrupt maintenance and send the ship out regardless.
Because of the desire for efficiency, the end result would still likely be the same, but a much better experience for the customer.
Did we ever have that in the series, maintenance? Hey guys, today we have no adventure for you. The starship is on maintenance, the crew is on leave, so besides some commercials we have a black screen for you to watch. Realise, it looks a lot like space. Have fun.
Kidding. I was the other day wondering, how long can starships without support? I would say forever, if the crew has all the competence to make repairs.
Well, we did have the one where the Enterprise-D went for a "baryon sweep" (go to Wikipedia, look up "baryon," see how embarrassingly bad the science is there), except that the maintenance cycle did not go as planned so there was an adventure anyway.
We also had one where the NX-01 stopped at a repair station that wasn't all it appeared to be.
Oh, and I can think of a few times maintenance on DS9 caused problems, like tripping a Cardassian anti-rebellion system, or trying to go raiding for parts on Empok Nor, which backfired.
Actually, that particular Repair Station..., was a Whole Lot More than it appeared to be!
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Alternately, the Voyager was built a long, long time after the Enterprise and they don't need to do baryon sweeps anymore.
And if they actually did do a Baryon Sweep of Voyager, it probably would have destroyed all the Bio-Neural Gel packs in the computer system.
They are made of Organic Substances.
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Head canon all you want. Maintenance time is a time gate to keep you from over collecting the rewards.
Sure there is a "draw" to make money (buy more ships), but if they reduce the maintenance times, they need to nerf rewards.
Or they could move the maintenence time and add it to the project time instead.
Same thing in terms of time but you could at least send the same ships straight back out again.
My 2c
If they add it to the project time, the slot would still be occupied by the project, and you wouldn't have to make any decisions about how you fill the free project slot with your best ships on maintance.
That's basically the whole idea behind the maintance. You got slots, but your best ships are unavailable. So you have to carefully select your ships so you can fully utilize the slots and get the most benefits possible in the time you spend playing.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Voyager did went to maintenace from time to time , but they didn't made an episode about it ... it would be boring . You would like to see an entire episode how Seven and the naughty half klingon girl works 24/7 to fix plasma relays and other thing , and Hairy Kim brakes them in a split of a second ? Or would you rather see them fighting borgs. Allsow you shouldn't take the show as given ... think how many shuttles did they lost/destroy ... one/episode ? That would make Intrepid class a carrier
Comments
As far as lore goes mostly everyone got it completely backwards. Names, places, lore of planets or counting number of torpedo projectiles left on voyager season 2, has no meaning.
The themes of every episode are absolutely disconnected from the lore. Or in other words, lore geeks completely misunderstand star trek. Yes it is semi sci-geek but the message is actual philosophical, political and psychological etc.
We don't need to know the name of the planet, rather simply to understand the underlying theme is racism, for example.
Voyager was a terrible show.
The premise was great though, in where this crew would have to face moral dilemma (1up lore geeks) in a survial situation.
I find that every single character on that show so shallow and emotional immature, it angers me.
The immature klingon with the immature boyfriend? Harry kim? Over the top immature. Neelix and his girlfriend - who was litterly written AS a kid, the list goes on and on. Seven of nine again a child character only it was so un-intelligently written, it was an insult to children.
.. 63
And there were several "Special Event" Ships I didn't bother to earn through the years.
And that's just on my Delta Recruit.
I haven't even looked as to how many my Original Toon has available yet.
wow
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
so your answer to maintenance is to make the missions last longer and tie up valuable mission slots that could be used on alternative missions with ships that are not on cooldown while the ships you are so worried about are on cooldown, makes sense.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
And yet, STO is almost exclusively based on Voyager...
If you are trying to justify the cooldown, put it that way, it is NOT because the assignment get completed in 15 mins or 3 hours 30 mins for YOUR convenience that the ship actually travels and does the job so fast. The assignment should take a week, but you get the result and the reward way faster.
Stop complaining and play the game the way it is designed to be played. All players have to bear with Admiralty cooldowns...Well maintenance.
Here's exactly what I liked about Voyager:
1. Tim Russ. Excellent Vulcan. He channeled Nimoy brilliantly.
2. Robert Picardo. Excellent ***hole. He owned every scene he was in. His taking command of the Prometheus was probably the high point of the series for me. Yes, even with Andy TRIBBLE in the room.
3. Opening theme music. Best since TMP.
4. Sulu's return. Crappy episode though. Still .... Sulu.
That's all I can think of. The show was a total waste of 6.8 years of film. Would rather watch the final season of Enterprise ad nauseum.
Even if you do it to yoursel-.......
HEY, I LIKED THAT LAST SEASON!!
Well, we did have the one where the Enterprise-D went for a "baryon sweep" (go to Wikipedia, look up "baryon," see how embarrassingly bad the science is there), except that the maintenance cycle did not go as planned so there was an adventure anyway.
We also had one where the NX-01 stopped at a repair station that wasn't all it appeared to be.
Oh, and I can think of a few times maintenance on DS9 caused problems, like tripping a Cardassian anti-rebellion system, or trying to go raiding for parts on Empok Nor, which backfired.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Yeah...what we see of maintenance on TV is typically maintenance gone wrong. Just imagine the cooldown time resulting from some of those incidents.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Or they could move the maintenence time and add it to the project time instead.
Same thing in terms of time but you could at least send the same ships straight back out again.
My 2c
I agree it would make the most sense--especially since you are likely putting your best ships on the missions with the highest requirements, which should be more involved and take the most time. So you'd likely still have your best ships sidelined the longest. Unless of course you send a Vesta on a mission alone.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Now don't get me wrong: DOffs were a brilliant innovation. However, I fail to see the point of two game systems that accomplish the same goals. In my opinion, the missions could have been built instead for a DOff Assignment upgrade, as in, "What do you do once you hit Level 4?"
The cooldowns are basically irrelevant. Time gating is a part of DOffing already, because each assignment or mission takes time to accomplish. With a portion of the time devoted to 'maintenance' you simply open up mission slots faster than if the assignment merely lasted longer, and those with more ships, and more play time to assign them, benefit more because that is the design intent of the system.
So, enjoy DOffing 2.0 for all it's worth, and accept that time gating is going to happen.
I know this could sound bad, but having the missions take longer removes the advantage of having a lot of ships and playing the system well. If you don't try for 100% chance of completion all the time and have a large roster of ships you can flip more missions. This nets more rewards and encourages the ship sales. maintenance time should just be renamed if the ONLY problem is a head canon thematic.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
Not the same thing, since there is only a limited number of slots. If you got 1 hour assignment and 18 hour cooldown you can send your OTHER ships out after an hour, as opposed to hogging the slot until the next day.
But then that's the true core of this argument isn't it. People being jealous that other people have more ships and thus can do more assignments.
Gameplay wise it is of course a bottleneck for the rewards, which could be mitigated by buying more ships. This makes sense from a commercial and gameplay point of view. I am quite relaxed about this since I do not usually log on more than once a day and - while the rewards are indeed probably too large and I expect a nerf in one form or the other - they don't give anything I really really desperately need here and now. But I see how it could be annoying if you had to leave slots open after a couple of hours of gameplay with regular new mission starts. I still do think that the diminishing returns on time spent in the game (maintenance times, cooldown on lucrative doff missions, daily bonus marks) is not only good for the company (you will come back regularily instead of binge playing if you're after the rewards) but also for players, because getting less after a while of gameplay may make you think about doing something else.
But about "maintenance" - as has been said, this is not only the ship being in drydock completely analysed. You will need to check up a machine as often as possible, since any failure could be disastrous. So in our world, every commercial airplane will get maintenance after each and every trip, it just happens to be while people are boarding. But yes, there are technicians checking vital parts of the plane more or less every second it spends on the airport. In the military, vehicles, especially ships, planes and helicopters, will be checked at every possible moment. Sometimes, especially in the past, ships had to go for a long while not being able to be checked in a port, but guess what the sailors did while on sea? Checking the sails for holes, caulking and so on. All the time. Ships that went too long without maintenance would still work somehow and be at risk of complete failure. (The German expression for that is "Seelenverkäufer" - soul seller)
And yes, the Voyager was probably in that kind of situation - lack of proper repairs, improvised materials and so on - because there simply was no option of just going to a spacedock. That doesn't mean it would break down immediately, but it would mean that the risk was growing. And still there will be maintenance all the time. The fact that we didn't see it on screen is just that a real space farer's life would be boring most of the time - waiting, eating, sleeping, doing some repairs in your section, repeat - an not make for good TV. Just as the fact that we do not see them use the toilet on screen doesn't mean they held it all in for 7 years.
The relation of mission time to maintenance time is still not really lore friendly, though - even though in real life some vehicles (helicopters in adverse regions as an example) actually do spend more time getting checked and repaired than on an actual mission, it rarely would be by a factor of 20 or so.
Lol do a search on google for images. There is a hilarious spoof on how to use the three seashells everyone should see ;-)
A better model is to incentivize, not penalize. Imagine if "maintenance" periods were means of beefing up your card, either to get it to the full stats or to get some bonus to stats, but if you really wanted to you could interrupt maintenance and send the ship out regardless.
Because of the desire for efficiency, the end result would still likely be the same, but a much better experience for the customer.
Actually, that particular Repair Station..., was a Whole Lot More than it appeared to be!
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
And if they actually did do a Baryon Sweep of Voyager, it probably would have destroyed all the Bio-Neural Gel packs in the computer system.
They are made of Organic Substances.
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
That's basically the whole idea behind the maintance. You got slots, but your best ships are unavailable. So you have to carefully select your ships so you can fully utilize the slots and get the most benefits possible in the time you spend playing.