Its like watching paint dry waiting to get onto a PvE mission.

stuart1965

These shuttle event missions and the mirror invasion have seriously depleted the queues in all other PvE missions.
Trying to do Assault on Terok Nor as one example, Its like watching paint dry.waiting ages(yawn).
I know I have mentioned this before, But its all the more reason now, to have some new single PvE missions, similar to episodes in a way, and ground missions involving 1 player and a full away team. This would relieve the boredom of dead queues.
I've been playing this game now for roughly 5 years, and its not the same as it used to be. From what I have seen,many newer players simply do not like to queue up. Some missions which I think need looking at, as optional 1 player+4boffs would be, The big dig, Bug Hunt/elite, Undine infiltation/elite, Trans dimension, and probably others too.

nikephorus

The most exciting part is when you see 3 or 4 people in the queue and you think it's going to pop soon, but you end up waiting a few more minutes...just a few more minutes. Then suddenly the mission window pops up and you hear that not so familiar whistle. You accept the mission and wait...watching the seconds ticking away. As the counter gets lower you get a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach. You watch as it counts down to zero crushing all hope.

ltminns

The Klingon Fleet Alert shuttle mission suffers some of this as well; does not pop like the Federation one does.

yakodym

Well, you could always, you know, not just wait in the queue, but actually talk to people, ask them if they want to fly something, make a team, start a private game... :-D

rahmkota19

The problem is quite simple here.
.
For years, I've noticed a growing lack of helpfulness in the queues, because of a changing playerbase. When I joined just after F2P, I really tribbled around a lot in the STF's. I was not afraid to ask for help in how to do things and what to change in my build, seeing my fleet-at-that-time was not exactly helpful. And I got the help, in quantities that made me a good player.
Recently, this was discussed by my fleet. One of the guys mentioned how he recently got a question in team chat, answered that and he got insulted by somebody else that he was helping out.

Point is simple: helping in queues is a no-go these days. This lead to the general quality of the players dropping for years. Then Delta Rising did not exactly help either. What happened was people fleeing off into premade matches, initially through open channels, then through DPS-channels (with some exceptions such as Star Trek Battles).

Then add the ginormous forest of queues available to us these days, and hence why 3/4 of them are empty. If you want to play a queue, you need to set it up yourself through fleet or other channels. Pugging is a dying feature in this game, might as well accept it.

bergins

No matter what queue I'm waiting for, I usually have some project to restart, between DOffing, crafting, Admiralty, and Reputation projects. I queue up, then see how many I can fill before the queue pops.

Sometimes, it gets quite exciting.

That's kinda sad, when I reread it...

alcyoneserene

I really don't think the game has the resources (no thanks to PWE's lack of continued investing in the game beyond bare minimum while reaping all the profits - not a fact, but a growing suspicion) to revamp the way things are from a gameplay perspective.

Some things that might help:
- change PvE objectives around and have short-duration events with bonus marks on a rotating basis - I really don't think it can be that hard to do this provided they have a level editor
- greatly increase the difficulty of episode missions that one cannot skip (account-wide skip unlock once they are complete at least once for alts) so players can't just spacebar their way through the game thinking that's all that ever matters, creating a pug PvE MMO environment with players who are completely incapable and unwilling to work as a team towards objectives - many will quit and rage over this but the game will be better off since this isn't a children's game but Teen and up (not to say children can't play it and excel in it just the same but it need not cater to them exclusively and indeed it does not when it comes to many aspects of the game)
- normalize rewards based on mission difficulty, length, average time it takes to have a full queue
- prioritize bug fixes: things get broken at a faster pace then they are fixed, entire systems neglected or poorly fixed (Cannon procs, assault rifle rates of fire nerf vs DPS output adjustment, pet nerfs, broken consoles on ships (Eg. manheim, dyson seating)), players unable to log in due to server-side issues and client crashes, UI-generated Lag, excessive use of polygons (delta rising missions) - all of which reduce immersion, cut away participation, and lead to frustration
- individual scoring systems: minimize and penalize AFKers, mission failures assigned to individuals that cause the fail condition not entire team
- gameplay expansion (actual content) and PvP/E, balanced/classed PvP revival

I've taken part of one completely free to play game whose player base gradually faded away. There's no comparing it to STO, but the principle would be the same: fewer players online until even if you still want to play there's barely anyone there to start a match with and so you can't/don't.

Community building in a fleet is also not easy at all, since you have either completely open public fleets which end up no better than PUG queue-level interactions, or those with fewer members that themselves have a hard time recruiting other friends.

Something needs to be done about it.