I think the goal needs to be to fix overpowered abilities and also - just as important - fix underpowered abilities. [...]
That would be one (preferable) way of doing it, I agree.
Of course, that is a lot harder to do than other options, such as hard-capping the various stats, including dps, hps, speed, immunity uptime, resistance of hull and shield, etc.
And while I enjoy much of what the devs of the game deliver, as a team they do have certain weaknesses. Balancing is one of those. So I would propose to make it easy for them.
I think hard capping stuff however is a pretty dumb way to try to "balance" the game. It would lead to weird and unexpected behaviour during gameplay. It takes away considerably control, because suddenly the game decides: "Oh, you can't deal damage for the next few seconds to bring you back in line with DPS expectations".
You know how much people hate the part in Mirror Invasion where they closed all the portals and have to wait until the timer drops to 0 so the next phase of the mission begins? That's the same effect, except several times during combat in every combat.
And then, what are players to do if they can't add to their DPS. Of course they buff things like their healing capabilities or resist/immunity abilities so they cna last longer.
What does that help the low DPS player? Probably not at all. He still has low DPS, and the same healing as before. There is still a wide performance gap. And then you start capping "HPS" and resists and immunities and speed and everything and you could just remove most of the build choices - they are pointless as players are blocked by caps in every direction. You're back to needing to actually balance the different abilities and try to ensure that there are viable and diverse build paths still possible within your cap. The same thing you needed to do without the cap.
I think there is plenty of imbalance in the game, but I think this is one of the worst possible methods to try to fix it. Even if fixing imbalanced powers is more difficult, it's at least not likely to impact gameplay as weirdly.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
As a direct opposite to how Delta Rising made the game much more difficult when it was initially released, the introduction of season 11.5 with the new skill set seems to make the game a bit easy due to power creep.
I assume that Cryptic will make tweaks to balance out the game over time which is what they did when max level was boosted to level 60 with the release of DR.
DPS is beyond nerfing, it simply isn't an option at this point and as has been pointed out, you can't cap dps or damage per hit, which leaves you with very few options to level the playing field, the best of those that I can see: make dps impractical.
We can add consequences to having 'too much' dps, "too much" I think needs to be discussed at length between the dev team and the player base, they have to make it but at the end of the day, we have to play it if they want to make any money.
For example:-
- Add feedback pulse like effects to various enemies such as nanite transformers and gateways while nanites are in play, tuned right this would make builds doing tens to hundreds of thousands of dps far less effective as they'de spend most of the run in respawn, while people who are around the 'accepted dps mark' would likely have few to no issues with this as the combination of lower dps and more room for heals would allow them to resist what comes back.
- Less likely to implement than the previous option, add more skills and weapons to NPCs across the game, I've advocated this for years, if NPC ships had the same potential as their player counterparts then players would learn over the course of the game (many likely by imitation) how to build a capable ship. More to the point though, endgame NPCs could be loaded up with a mix of damage, healing and debuff abilities. I'd love to see a scramble sensors thrown out in a advanced STF with a 50k dps boat, team respawn anyone?
The game is built on handicapped NPCs with stupidly high hitpoints - that's the content. On top of that, the game does nothing to teach someone how to actually do good; instead, it just tells you to spend on stuff.
The result is the vast majority of players can't fly straight to save their lives and even if they could, have very little to no knowledge anyway. I saw it countless times pre-DR or whenever it was I last was advising on builds and such matters, people had the equipment, but they didn't know how to use it.
That is where sub-10k DPS players are, what they lack is one of/both knowledge and piloting. They don't lack gear, a simple check on STO gateway while sat at Earth Spacedock will show that by and large a typical player gets more right in terms of equipment than they do wrong.
Now, your approach is nerf the DPSers who are using what is available correctly, instead of teaching and guiding the 10kers in how to utilise what they generally have already - and it won't work.
What the game needs is content that is meant for high-performance players. Something that does not get nerfed when the 1-5k crowd cries about it.
That content exists. It is called "Elite queues", and almost all the super-duper-DPSers don't do them, except for Korfez now and then. I tried to queue up for Hive Onslaught Space Elite recently. Didn't pop ever. I even asked in the various channels. No one was interested.
While it is true that we are lacking a lot of elite queues, you do have a point.
There are even some elites that don't require a ton of DPS, like VCE. You need tankiness there, but guess what? Nobody plays that anymore.
It's a travesty that the players only got themselves to blame for.
[...]
Not that I would consider Elites to be "hard" on an objective measure, either. Certainly not for a team of 50kers.
I agree. And yet, people apparently don't even want that little bit of more difficulty. They prefer to blast through everything in ways the content designers (that's a different team than those who are responsible of the power creep, as far as I understand) never imagined.
Again, of course not. Because blasting through 2 piece-of-cake missions in 5 minutes total will get them a greater reward. The reward structure incentivizes repeating fast missions, so that's what people will do.
No, there may be some issues with that, but the devs should work on several other things first.
Department of random thoughts:
1. A Mk XIV Gold weapon only spits out X DPS. Period. End of discussion. That, right there, is the start of your "damage cap".
2. At best, a starship can bring 8 weapons to bear - whether it's a 4/4 "standard cruiser, broadside mode" build or the much-more-loved 5/3 "Scimitar" style build so you can have 5x forward energy weapons and 3x Omni-type beams (KCB, Ancient AP, Crafted AP being the most common pick). Again, another "limiter" on the amount of DPS that can be generated.
3. And then there's the (usually) 5 tactical console limit and/or the 11 overall console limit - you can only stack so many modifiers into these slots.
Bammo - your DPS cap.
What doesn't help, IMO, are things like:
Diminishing returns only on resistances, everything else, including anti-resistance debuffs, are "straight stacking". I think the system goes something like: Target puts on +300 "points" of resistance, which results in a, say, 74.3% resistance level due to diminishing returns and resistance cap. Opponent(s) put on -300 "points" of resistance debuff, which results not in a reduction to 0% resistance, but instead gives a -225.7% resistance that is instead applied as a damage multiplier, easily doubling base damage.
Outside of Science's "50% crit hit rate cap" (and even this is only on the L15 crafting "particle manipulator" trait, you can still exceed 50% crit hit rates with extra traits, skills, consoles, whatnot), the only limits to how much extra CritH percentage and/or CritD bonus you can build into your ship are the aforementioned weapon modifiers / console bonuses / chosen traits / etc. When "tooltip base" 1,800 point Grav Well IIIs are regularly seen by my "casual and not hyper-optimized" self doing 18,000+ yellow number damage per tick that has the "critical" listing on it...
Did I mention the plethora of areas that multiply the damages involved, sometimes multiplying highly multiplied damage?
You want to "reign in" the damage cap? How's about starting by having all multipliers only affect the "base" number, no more of this "cat 1 bonuses only calculate from the original base, but cat 2 bonuses calculate from the results of all the cat 1 bonuses and cat 3 bonuses are tacked on individually from the most recent multiplier till you're in ungodly number range.
Honestly, I much prefer a D&D-esque damage scaling system (1-12 per hit at L1, 40-50, maybe 100, at L20) vs. the "final fantasy" system where you start doing 30 damage and wind up doing 5 or 6 digit hits...
Detecting big-time "anti-old-school" bias here. NX? Lobi. TOS/TMP Connie? Super-promotion-box. (aka the two hardest ways to get ships) Excelsior & all 3 TNG "big hero" ships? C-Store. Please Equalize...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
The players with big dps numbers have them for a reason. They have spent a lot of time and money getting their builds put together and more time learning to fly them efficiently. Players with low dps haven't. It's really that simple. I don't know why some players want to punish others. It's kind of messed up really.
No, this is not important enough to require developer attention
Many players have still failed to get their ships to the the level suggested during Delta Rising. The Devs could announce that in one year's time there will be an event that will reward a super ultimate top-tier reward, and that said event will require you to have all MK XIV gear in order to stand a chance of completing the event.
Even with such advanced notice, and only requiring a standard that is basically expected of you now, many players would be tripping over themselves trying to get to the pulpit to cry foul, and complain that it was unfair.
There are plenty of things that could be changed that would make the game play more appealing to the broad base, but the reality is that it's not going to happen in a way that will satisfy 10% of the players, let alone the greater majority. The simplest solution is for players to recognize that they HAVE to improve in order to keep up with what is essentially the natural evolution of the game.
They have. There's very few encounters in the game where DPS is the core design element. Everything from Crystaline Entity to Hive Space all require more than just DPS.
Don't kid yourself. DPS, staying alive and pressing F at key moments is all endgame space content demands. Everything else is sub-optimal. Play an MMO with raids that have complex mechanics, requiring well-thought out interplay between the 3 main classes, and you'll realise how absurdly simple our own STFs and fleet actions are.
[...]
Now, your approach is nerf the DPSers who are using what is available correctly, instead of teaching and guiding the 10kers in how to utilise what they generally have already - and it won't work.
I simply asked if we should narrow the gap between low and high dps. That can be done in a myriad ways. I have one idea (which is not part of the question asked) what could be done easily, but that is by far not the only option to achieve that.
But it doesn't matter. The vote is in: No, we should not narrow that gap. People are happy with what it is.
That is a terrible premise from a statistics perspective; drawing a whole game conclusion which affects probably several thousand players from just 37 people surveyed, when only 12 of them vote that the current is fine. (and your conclusion is wrong; 18 people are in favour of changes in the broad sense, with the variable being how much of a priority, and the 7 who voted this isn't worthy of Cryptic intervention to fix may or may not be in favour of player driven efforts to equalise the gap) And you have no ability to differentiate sub-groups within those people who think it is fine, or even to account for the fact people may vote for the normal given your suggestions in this thread and their disagreement with them, but who would otherwise be in favour of making changes - like me, I agree with the premise that it should be narrowed, but I object to your methods because they reward incompetency and punish excellency.
If your options were instead:
"I strongly agree with the principle that the DPS gap should be narrowed"
"I slightly agree with the premise that the DPS gap should be narrowed"
"I have no opinion"
"I slightly disagree with the premise that the DPS gap should be narrowed"
"I strongly disagree with the premise that the DPS gap should be narrowed"
That would at least give qualified information that could be taken at face value about what the surveyed players would like.
Then we could analyse the methods suggested, and we could do a new poll to ascertain support/disagreement for each method, also controlling for players who don't agree with Cryptic interfering with players.
With that, we could hypothetically say "The vote is in: No, we should not narrow that gap. People are happy with what it is." - that conclusion is not drawable with the information available, especially not that second clause.
----
In other words, the poll is terrible, and, you can't handle numbers given you think 12 votes against is larger than 18 votes for, with no control variable for the remaining 7 voters.
You don't want to play with high dpsers vaping everything, you want segregation of the community.. fortunately dpsers have made their own channels to do that themselves.
I ran Hive Elite three times today, the rewards are nothing special we just did it for fun and because we wanted the challenge.. we just did it in private matches. High dps players don't want to end up in a queue with a group that's woefully unprepared for elite content.
I don't see how capping dps would help you, they'd still be the best at what they do and they'd still end up in queues with people that can't fight their way out of wet paper bag.
Perhaps Cryptic should create a built in parser and track everyones dps, make it so that anyone that cracks 30k no longer be allowed to queue for normal content, anyone above 50k banned from advanced would that kind of situation work for you?
So, in deference to the many players who wish to believe it's their remarkable skill in keeping 4 abilities on almost constant cooldown that separates them from the low DPS crowd, let me just suggest the FIRST tool I would use, above all others in closing the gap would be BETTER TEACHING IN GAME.
Some of the behavior separating the low from high is incredibly poorly described by the game. And yet is incredibly easy to describe. Simple things like "hey, attack patterns are critically important to your performance."
Uh. Dude. No offense. But the conclusion is quite valid, given that we have only about 100 regular forum users that take part in such polls, and that we have two groups of answers: "Yes", and "No". If you care to try a brand-new Greek mathematical method called "addition" (Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addition ), you can find out that two-thirds of those who cared to vote do not want change for one reason or another.
I am all for rigorous thinking and analysis, but some conclusions are just safe.
Uh. Dude. No offense, but you poisoned your own poll by weighing in with a specific change in almost the same breath as you asked the broader question. If you'd like more reliable results in the future two suggestions - make the poll private because people who wish to clarify their position will do so, and don't get into your own position until there's at least 8-10 other posts there. The poll writer is not anonymous and their comments are extremely polarizing.
No, this is not important enough to require developer attention
You're right, It's not incredibly complicated and it is poorly understood. But it's not as simple as making sure you activate abilities everytime they're off cooldown. While keeping ability CDs at or near global is great, it's waiting an extra couple of second to activate a 10 second attack pattern to have the most over lap with a 15 second beam enhancement. But this, along with positioning, is what separates mid-level from high-end DPS.
No, there may be some issues with that, but the devs should work on several other things first.
No matter how much you will try to make stronger players weaker, there will still be a wide gap between someone who knows game mechanics and someone who haven't bothered to even read tooltips correctly. Even if something delivers large blow to those high-DPSers, they will still manage to adapt while your average player will suffer even more. Those who do high DPS are able to do it just because they are better players.
While I can agree that the game balance is out of hand, there's nothing Cryptic could do. They can't realistically make the high DPSers weaker, unless your idea is just banning everyone who does more than X amount of DPS.
What they can do though, is introduce an in-game parser (which has way more functions than just DPS-meter!).
P.S. Power creep sells and I'm pretty sure there are people out there who spend tons of cash on upgrades and ships and other trinkets just to get a bit nearer to those on top of DPS charts.
Is the performance gap too wide on standardized tests? We don't want those students who are unwilling to learn to have their feelings hurt, we should probably limit how well the students who have prepared themselves can do.
No, this is not important enough to require developer attention
I'd go as far as to say many, if not most, of the so-called high-DPSers would also like more content that doesn't require just pure DPS. I for one would love to see queues that actually required the traditional healer-tank-damage teams to complete, but even if we got them, if anyone thinks that will change the power gap, they are sadly mistaken.
Edit: to expand on this, we would still have channels, like the DPS channels, where the high end players go to find other high end players who specialize in those roles. And instead of having leader boards for just DPS, we would have ones for heals and damaged tanked as well.
I'm all for making pure DPS impractical by introducing NPCs with more abilities or STFs that require more than just pew pew.
I don't know if that's what the community at large wants though.
We would adapt, figure out the optimal way of dealing with the challenge, and turn it into trivial content. People who are having trouble firing their weapons and using buffs at the same time will find that content impossible and come to the forums to complain.
I can't believe that I am in complete agreement with Nabreeki, of all people, yet I am. Give credit where credit is due.
I think a more interesting study would be to find if there is some sort of correlation between really high/low dps and:
Quality of computer/hardware
Use of macros
Internet speed/fps rate/server data routing
I have a (sci) build similar/almost identical to some other people but yet when parsed thier activation rate for Grav Well is three times as often, and I activate it the second its available. Same With FAW.
I am starting to think part of my "cap" is data transfer related.
No, this is not important enough to require developer attention
That might explain, an inability to maximize one's own potential, and when you get into the higher end of the DPS spectrum that can certainly cause wild variations in performance nit unlike during huge lag spikes, but I highly doubt that would come close to explaining the gap between high and low DPS.
No, there may be some issues with that, but the devs should work on several other things first.
> We would adapt, figure out the optimal way of dealing with the challenge, and turn it into trivial content. People who are having trouble firing their weapons and using buffs at the same time will find that content impossible and come to the forums to complain.
Oh I know people like you would. But when you see people complaining about the Voth, Iconians, Terrans and now the Na'kuhl, you start to doubt if the majority really wants harder content.
Only problem I have with the current DPS balance is that Tac Captain powers buff "All Damage". This needs to be changed so that it buffs weapons damage ONLY and not secondary damage sources such as science powers, embassy powers, kemocite etc.
Science captains to get a number of ways to buff science damage, but it's absolutely nothing compared to what tac's can do.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
No, this is not important enough to require developer attention
No because my enjoyment of this game depends on my damage potential, bein' OP and blowin' ships up.
Takin' a nerf-bat to the entire playerbase and smackin' us down because some people are too lazy or don't want to work out a setup isn't the answer.
The content in STO is seriously lackin', I think.
More (challenging) content is the solution to your problem, OP, in my noobish, uneducated opinion, that is.
No, there may be some issues with that, but the devs should work on several other things first.
> I have a (sci) build similar/almost identical to some other people but yet when parsed thier activation rate for Grav Well is three times as often, and I activate it the second its available. Same With FAW.
That could be due to a number of things like difference in traits, skill tree setup, BOffs (Krenim), items (SciCDR, Temporal Warp Core and Temporal Negotiator) or simply how they trigger tactical abilities to maximize AHOD (a matter of timing).
> Oh I know people like you would. But when you see people complaining about the Voth, Iconians, Terrans and now the Na'kuhl, you start to doubt if the majority really wants harder content.
That is generally the problem when nerfs are called for. People think it will slow down the people doing the most damage, but it actually hurts your average player the most.
That is why I have been such an advocate of more elite content and the ability to start STFs with less than a full team. It lets everyone better tailor the difficulty to the challenge they actually want.
Except the queues are empty for anything that's not easy.
If this is to be addressed via queues and content, I'd say remove every queue but the elite ones.
Elite content is not meant to be farmed by any five random people. The non-time gated elites are played, just not through queues. Elite content should take an actual elite team with coordinated tactics and specific builds.
Comments
You know how much people hate the part in Mirror Invasion where they closed all the portals and have to wait until the timer drops to 0 so the next phase of the mission begins? That's the same effect, except several times during combat in every combat.
And then, what are players to do if they can't add to their DPS. Of course they buff things like their healing capabilities or resist/immunity abilities so they cna last longer.
What does that help the low DPS player? Probably not at all. He still has low DPS, and the same healing as before. There is still a wide performance gap. And then you start capping "HPS" and resists and immunities and speed and everything and you could just remove most of the build choices - they are pointless as players are blocked by caps in every direction. You're back to needing to actually balance the different abilities and try to ensure that there are viable and diverse build paths still possible within your cap. The same thing you needed to do without the cap.
I think there is plenty of imbalance in the game, but I think this is one of the worst possible methods to try to fix it. Even if fixing imbalanced powers is more difficult, it's at least not likely to impact gameplay as weirdly.
I assume that Cryptic will make tweaks to balance out the game over time which is what they did when max level was boosted to level 60 with the release of DR.
We can add consequences to having 'too much' dps, "too much" I think needs to be discussed at length between the dev team and the player base, they have to make it but at the end of the day, we have to play it if they want to make any money.
For example:-
- Add feedback pulse like effects to various enemies such as nanite transformers and gateways while nanites are in play, tuned right this would make builds doing tens to hundreds of thousands of dps far less effective as they'de spend most of the run in respawn, while people who are around the 'accepted dps mark' would likely have few to no issues with this as the combination of lower dps and more room for heals would allow them to resist what comes back.
- Less likely to implement than the previous option, add more skills and weapons to NPCs across the game, I've advocated this for years, if NPC ships had the same potential as their player counterparts then players would learn over the course of the game (many likely by imitation) how to build a capable ship. More to the point though, endgame NPCs could be loaded up with a mix of damage, healing and debuff abilities. I'd love to see a scramble sensors thrown out in a advanced STF with a 50k dps boat, team respawn anyone?
The result is the vast majority of players can't fly straight to save their lives and even if they could, have very little to no knowledge anyway. I saw it countless times pre-DR or whenever it was I last was advising on builds and such matters, people had the equipment, but they didn't know how to use it.
That is where sub-10k DPS players are, what they lack is one of/both knowledge and piloting. They don't lack gear, a simple check on STO gateway while sat at Earth Spacedock will show that by and large a typical player gets more right in terms of equipment than they do wrong.
Now, your approach is nerf the DPSers who are using what is available correctly, instead of teaching and guiding the 10kers in how to utilise what they generally have already - and it won't work.
While it is true that we are lacking a lot of elite queues, you do have a point.
There are even some elites that don't require a ton of DPS, like VCE. You need tankiness there, but guess what? Nobody plays that anymore.
It's a travesty that the players only got themselves to blame for.
"Let them eat static!"
1. A Mk XIV Gold weapon only spits out X DPS. Period. End of discussion. That, right there, is the start of your "damage cap".
2. At best, a starship can bring 8 weapons to bear - whether it's a 4/4 "standard cruiser, broadside mode" build or the much-more-loved 5/3 "Scimitar" style build so you can have 5x forward energy weapons and 3x Omni-type beams (KCB, Ancient AP, Crafted AP being the most common pick). Again, another "limiter" on the amount of DPS that can be generated.
3. And then there's the (usually) 5 tactical console limit and/or the 11 overall console limit - you can only stack so many modifiers into these slots.
Bammo - your DPS cap.
What doesn't help, IMO, are things like:
Diminishing returns only on resistances, everything else, including anti-resistance debuffs, are "straight stacking". I think the system goes something like: Target puts on +300 "points" of resistance, which results in a, say, 74.3% resistance level due to diminishing returns and resistance cap. Opponent(s) put on -300 "points" of resistance debuff, which results not in a reduction to 0% resistance, but instead gives a -225.7% resistance that is instead applied as a damage multiplier, easily doubling base damage.
Outside of Science's "50% crit hit rate cap" (and even this is only on the L15 crafting "particle manipulator" trait, you can still exceed 50% crit hit rates with extra traits, skills, consoles, whatnot), the only limits to how much extra CritH percentage and/or CritD bonus you can build into your ship are the aforementioned weapon modifiers / console bonuses / chosen traits / etc. When "tooltip base" 1,800 point Grav Well IIIs are regularly seen by my "casual and not hyper-optimized" self doing 18,000+ yellow number damage per tick that has the "critical" listing on it...
Did I mention the plethora of areas that multiply the damages involved, sometimes multiplying highly multiplied damage?
You want to "reign in" the damage cap? How's about starting by having all multipliers only affect the "base" number, no more of this "cat 1 bonuses only calculate from the original base, but cat 2 bonuses calculate from the results of all the cat 1 bonuses and cat 3 bonuses are tacked on individually from the most recent multiplier till you're in ungodly number range.
Honestly, I much prefer a D&D-esque damage scaling system (1-12 per hit at L1, 40-50, maybe 100, at L20) vs. the "final fantasy" system where you start doing 30 damage and wind up doing 5 or 6 digit hits...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
Even with such advanced notice, and only requiring a standard that is basically expected of you now, many players would be tripping over themselves trying to get to the pulpit to cry foul, and complain that it was unfair.
There are plenty of things that could be changed that would make the game play more appealing to the broad base, but the reality is that it's not going to happen in a way that will satisfy 10% of the players, let alone the greater majority. The simplest solution is for players to recognize that they HAVE to improve in order to keep up with what is essentially the natural evolution of the game.
same reply.
Don't kid yourself. DPS, staying alive and pressing F at key moments is all endgame space content demands. Everything else is sub-optimal. Play an MMO with raids that have complex mechanics, requiring well-thought out interplay between the 3 main classes, and you'll realise how absurdly simple our own STFs and fleet actions are.
If your options were instead:
"I strongly agree with the principle that the DPS gap should be narrowed"
"I slightly agree with the premise that the DPS gap should be narrowed"
"I have no opinion"
"I slightly disagree with the premise that the DPS gap should be narrowed"
"I strongly disagree with the premise that the DPS gap should be narrowed"
That would at least give qualified information that could be taken at face value about what the surveyed players would like.
Then we could analyse the methods suggested, and we could do a new poll to ascertain support/disagreement for each method, also controlling for players who don't agree with Cryptic interfering with players.
With that, we could hypothetically say "The vote is in: No, we should not narrow that gap. People are happy with what it is." - that conclusion is not drawable with the information available, especially not that second clause.
----
In other words, the poll is terrible, and, you can't handle numbers given you think 12 votes against is larger than 18 votes for, with no control variable for the remaining 7 voters.
I ran Hive Elite three times today, the rewards are nothing special we just did it for fun and because we wanted the challenge.. we just did it in private matches. High dps players don't want to end up in a queue with a group that's woefully unprepared for elite content.
I don't see how capping dps would help you, they'd still be the best at what they do and they'd still end up in queues with people that can't fight their way out of wet paper bag.
Perhaps Cryptic should create a built in parser and track everyones dps, make it so that anyone that cracks 30k no longer be allowed to queue for normal content, anyone above 50k banned from advanced would that kind of situation work for you?
Some of the behavior separating the low from high is incredibly poorly described by the game. And yet is incredibly easy to describe. Simple things like "hey, attack patterns are critically important to your performance."
Uh. Dude. No offense, but you poisoned your own poll by weighing in with a specific change in almost the same breath as you asked the broader question. If you'd like more reliable results in the future two suggestions - make the poll private because people who wish to clarify their position will do so, and don't get into your own position until there's at least 8-10 other posts there. The poll writer is not anonymous and their comments are extremely polarizing.
While I can agree that the game balance is out of hand, there's nothing Cryptic could do. They can't realistically make the high DPSers weaker, unless your idea is just banning everyone who does more than X amount of DPS.
What they can do though, is introduce an in-game parser (which has way more functions than just DPS-meter!).
P.S. Power creep sells and I'm pretty sure there are people out there who spend tons of cash on upgrades and ships and other trinkets just to get a bit nearer to those on top of DPS charts.
U.S.S. Buteo Regalis - Brigid Multi-Mission Surveillance Explorer build
R.R.W. Ri Maajon - Khopesh Tactical Dreadnought Warbird build
My Youtube channel containing STO videos.
I don't know if that's what the community at large wants though.
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Edit: to expand on this, we would still have channels, like the DPS channels, where the high end players go to find other high end players who specialize in those roles. And instead of having leader boards for just DPS, we would have ones for heals and damaged tanked as well.
We would adapt, figure out the optimal way of dealing with the challenge, and turn it into trivial content. People who are having trouble firing their weapons and using buffs at the same time will find that content impossible and come to the forums to complain.
I think a more interesting study would be to find if there is some sort of correlation between really high/low dps and:
Quality of computer/hardware
Use of macros
Internet speed/fps rate/server data routing
I have a (sci) build similar/almost identical to some other people but yet when parsed thier activation rate for Grav Well is three times as often, and I activate it the second its available. Same With FAW.
I am starting to think part of my "cap" is data transfer related.
Oh I know people like you would. But when you see people complaining about the Voth, Iconians, Terrans and now the Na'kuhl, you start to doubt if the majority really wants harder content.
| USS Curiosity - Pathfinder | USS Rift - Eternal |
The Science Ship Build Thread - Share your Sci Ship builds here!
Science captains to get a number of ways to buff science damage, but it's absolutely nothing compared to what tac's can do.
Takin' a nerf-bat to the entire playerbase and smackin' us down because some people are too lazy or don't want to work out a setup isn't the answer.
The content in STO is seriously lackin', I think.
More (challenging) content is the solution to your problem, OP, in my noobish, uneducated opinion, that is.
That could be due to a number of things like difference in traits, skill tree setup, BOffs (Krenim), items (SciCDR, Temporal Warp Core and Temporal Negotiator) or simply how they trigger tactical abilities to maximize AHOD (a matter of timing).
| USS Curiosity - Pathfinder | USS Rift - Eternal |
The Science Ship Build Thread - Share your Sci Ship builds here!
That is generally the problem when nerfs are called for. People think it will slow down the people doing the most damage, but it actually hurts your average player the most.
That is why I have been such an advocate of more elite content and the ability to start STFs with less than a full team. It lets everyone better tailor the difficulty to the challenge they actually want.
Elite content is not meant to be farmed by any five random people. The non-time gated elites are played, just not through queues. Elite content should take an actual elite team with coordinated tactics and specific builds.