The Dead PvE queues Problem. A simply solution to the ground PvE missions.

stuart1965

Open up the PvE queues by taking away the minimum number of players needed. Allow full away teams with player.
If fleets want to band together 5+ in a team then let them do it on the private queues.
No more waiting ages to get onto a mission. Come on cryptic, give us a break please. A miracle cryptic might listen.
Well a guy can hope.

sle1989

I think an issue is that there are over 80 missions in the PvE queues (counting all the difficulties as separate). I think the missions should randomly cycle every week (minus new ones or otherwise featured missions) so that there are somewhere between 10 and 15 missions at any one time.

markhawkman

Yeah, Champs has a rotation system where a certain mission may only be up for an hour at a time.

bernatk

markhawkman wrote: »

Yeah, Champs has a rotation system where a certain mission may only be up for an hour at a time.

Problem is STFs tell you a story. And usually quite a good one.

markhawkman

They used to. Actually some of the Champs queues have decent stories too.

davefenestrator

Weekly rotation would help. That gives people playing around the world and at every hour of the day the chance to play them.

e30ernest

The problem with rotating queues is that some queues are simply not liked. Personally if they implement queue rotations and the only queues available are ones I won't be playing normally, I'd just do something else.

The problem isn't too many queues. The problem is that some queues are not attractive enough to play.

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kekvin

Some of the ques are only gd for the reps. I tend to stick to the borg stfs (isa,kasa,csa) hoping for elites of these

tessaravejgan

This thread again, been a while . Most queues are designed with 5 people in mind so taking that away would req redesign of queues. What needs to be done is some consistency in both rewards and difficulty first. Its not really nice that say elite rl'hho station gives you barely 40-50 marks while say elite bugs give you around 80-100 (non daily) or that enemies in say adv borg disco are relatively easy to deal with while adv azure nebula can kill you in 1-2 shots (at least in my exp as non dps'er). Now weekly rotation might not work well since a lot of (especially never) queues have time gates and people despise those. Think events like what we had with The Breach is what might work out where you do the event and get some special reward afterwards however it should be a bit shorter (say 7 days instead of 15) and the reward should be account unlock not character. I made my 7th char the other day and will probably make 1-2 more once the expansion hits. Devs must be delusional if they think I'm gonna log in to the game and do such an event on every one of them. For people who say yeah but they didn't earn them, that's true, they didn't. I did, the person who is behind the desk and all those chars.

lordsteve1

I'm pretty sure everything on this topic has been said a bazillion times already with hundreds of suggestions for improvements. And all of it has been ignored so it seems a moot point now to discuss it all again.
But good luck to anyone who wishes to do so!

jade1280

bernatk wrote: »

markhawkman wrote: »

Yeah, Champs has a rotation system where a certain mission may only be up for an hour at a time.

Problem is STFs tell you a story. And usually quite a good one.

I am sure it is a great story that i am not on at 4 am in the morning to hear.

alcyoneserene

lordsteve1 wrote: »

I'm pretty sure everything on this topic has been said a bazillion times already with hundreds of suggestions for improvements. And all of it has been ignored so it seems a moot point now to discuss it all again.
But good luck to anyone who wishes to do so!

...As with every other topic trying to fix the fundamental problems with the game.

The message is clear: this is what you get, nothing more, now buy more expensive stuff, and when you already own the stuff you wanted, gamble away for even more expensive and rare stuff.

e30ernest

While I am against rotating or culling queues at this point, I'd like to be able to set up an STF with less than 5 people on board. Even let us go solo if we want to. No need to redesign the STF to adjust for one player. Give us the full STF and let us win or fail to our own anguish or delight.

misterferengi

Rotating the queues and removing my favourite queues for x amount of time wouldn't encourage or force me to play content i don't currently play. All it would do is once my fav is not longer available daily to play and say i could only play it every fortnight on a rotary schedule, i'd probably end up not playing that queue either due to not having access when i want.
There's also a reason i don't play certain queues, the 2 biggest contributiors are 1. the length of time to complete, and 2. the PvE broken up into time gated sections.

risian4

Most queues wouldn't require much rework. The only ground mission that I can think of that would really need 3 people in it if no changes are made to the missions themselves, is IGA/IGN. All others can already start with 3 or even less people. 5 is actually too much, especially in most of the normal queues. Making it possible to play these with 3 or 4 players would not only make them launch faster, it may also lead to a better experience of the mission itself.

Rotation is not a solution. Simply temporarily removing a lot of playable content to force people to play other missions has never worked out well. Even if people would continue to play, they'd most likely still choose the one mission (out of the 10-15 that are available that week) that are done in as little time as possible.

e30ernest wrote: »

The problem with rotating queues is that some queues are simply not liked. Personally if they implement queue rotations and the only queues available are ones I won't be playing normally, I'd just do something else.

The problem isn't too many queues. The problem is that some queues are not attractive enough to play.

And that problem is most likely a result of the attitude most players have: if it cannot be completed in a fraction of the time (see, for example, all the hate against time-gated stuff) and if you cannot shoot your way through, it's simply not liked and no one will play it. One can argue whether this has to do with mission design or... well, players design or human 'design' in general

risian4

At least ground missions are suffering less from power creep than their space counter parts. And there's more different roles viable, career is more important, missions are more dynamic than just 'get in range, press spacebar'.

I don't think the missions themselves are the problem. They're more interesting to me than the average space mission, especially when comparing them to the space missions that contain either one big enemy (like CCA) or that are nothing but a race and fight for instead of against enemies ('follow the fastest flying ship and keep up with that single player if you and the rest of the team want to have a chance to contribute anything') like ISA.

Maybe it's just that people want to fly ships, or that ground missions usually require more thought and team work instead. Not to mention that it's more difficult to stack dozens of buffs that all increase your performance. Ground builds require more thought as you simply cannot excel in everything and you have to work within the restrictions of your career. That might make it more difficult or less accessible for the average player. I wouldn't consider that to be a flaw though. If you want to solve the problem of 'dead' or rather underpopulated queues, I don't think it will help to change the missions or ground mechanics and restrictions themselves. The ground part is an example of how the space part of the game should be.

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e30ernest

Time gates are fine in my opinion if the *gate" feels natural. GGA in my opinion is how not to do time gates (boring to sit still while shutting down gates) while Counterpoint was done well.

To be honest, there is little replay value for most of the queues if you've completed your reps and don't need the marks. In my opinion they should add Elite Mark sinks where you can trade Elite Marks for special consumables, accolades, upgrades, etc.

kiralyn

risian4 wrote: »

One can argue whether this has to do with mission design or... well, players design or human 'design' in general

(thinking back to WoW, and the various threads talking about how people just wanted to slam out their daily dungeons in 15 min, and how it was so "selfish" of people in PUGs to expect the rest of the party to help them finish a dungeon quest they had - which might take a few more minutes... /facepalm)

I'mma go with "human nature" for 500, Alex.

saedeith

Only way rotating queues could work is if you could choose your own marks. With that said running Borg queues and getting Iconian or Terran marks doens't make much sense.

markhawkman

kekvin wrote: »

Some of the ques are only gd for the reps. I tend to stick to the borg stfs (isa,kasa,csa) hoping for elites of these

Yeah, personally I don't bother with queues unless I actually want the reward from it.

saedeith wrote: »

Only way rotating queues could work is if you could choose your own marks. With that said running Borg queues and getting Iconian or Terran marks doens't make much sense.

True. One of the biggest difference is that Champions doesn't actually have multiple end-game sets of marks the way STO does. The Recognition system is basically tiered so that certain reps are end-game and the rest are not. SCR is the primary end-game recog, with GCR as the elite recog. Then there's 3 specialized reps, one for PvP, one for the Nemesis system, and another for the Supervillain onslaught system.

Of these only SCR is obtained via queues.

risingwolfshadow

Is it me or are queues, with the exception of ISA, becoming a bit unpopular?

murkalael

I like fast things, for me CCA is the perfect one. No thinking, no requirements, just shoot at will and better part, most times only lasts 2 minutes or less. I hate borgs, and try to avoid complex queues that requires certain conditions to be acomplished and finally I only do ground when tricked to, all my ground gear are mission given most still green MKX (still have an MKVI kit module). So more CCA like queues would increase rotation, You might noticed while most queues are empty, CCA during week you can see 30-50 active players and more on line of waiting, also I see more people on Deep Space Encounter than in other queues, in my oppinion, is because is simple, shoot and shoot.

markhawkman

DSEs and Red Alerts are also great options for grinding starship mastery.

lordsteve1

murkalael#7691 wrote: »

I like fast things, for me CCA is the perfect one. No thinking, no requirements, just shoot at will and better part, most times only lasts 2 minutes or less. I hate borgs, and try to avoid complex queues that requires certain conditions to be acomplished and finally I only do ground when tricked to, all my ground gear are mission given most still green MKX (still have an MKVI kit module). So more CCA like queues would increase rotation, You might noticed while most queues are empty, CCA during week you can see 30-50 active players and more on line of waiting, also I see more people on Deep Space Encounter than in other queues, in my oppinion, is because is simple, shoot and shoot.

I'm not entirely sure if you're trolling here or just naive of the situation. 50 players in CCA is NOTHING compared to what you used to have every evening pre-DR launch. You'd easily see several hundred players in each of the top 5-10 missions along with a variety of other queues running with only minimal wait (how often have you seen Vault Ensnared pop these days?).

Believe me, the queues these days are effectively dead outside of ISA and CCA, with the very occasional smattering of KSA/CSA/Fleet Alert.

I think the first part of your post is a perfect example of the issue here. Whether the majority of players are that way inclined or not, the overwhelming trend is to go towards the quick-fire 2-5 min runs, and avoid anything that last any longer. The game is so grind intensive it seem people are genuinely looking at it more like a time:reward ratio for a job than a game they could enjoy by doing something different.
Part of that is Cryptics issue as they make the content, plus they also make the grind that pushes people to the paths of least resistance. But the players also are to blame as we blindly go along with it.

gerwalk0769

e30ernest wrote: »

The problem isn't too many queues. The problem is that some queues are not attractive enough to play.

Completely agree.

In addition some queues, ground, are so difficult that players do not publicly play them. These either need to be tweaked, some mission mechanics better explained, or in the worst case removed. In particular, the Attack on Terrok Nor Elite queue is barren, and successfully completing the specialist optionals seems to have been limited to a few players.

hunteralpha84

I'd prefer it if they made more battlezones. Not the tedious slogfest that the badlands is but I enjoy the dyson battlezone and the 8472 one.

murkalael

lordsteve1 wrote: »

murkalael#7691 wrote: »

I like fast things, for me CCA is the perfect one. No thinking, no requirements, just shoot at will and better part, most times only lasts 2 minutes or less. I hate borgs, and try to avoid complex queues that requires certain conditions to be acomplished and finally I only do ground when tricked to, all my ground gear are mission given most still green MKX (still have an MKVI kit module). So more CCA like queues would increase rotation, You might noticed while most queues are empty, CCA during week you can see 30-50 active players and more on line of waiting, also I see more people on Deep Space Encounter than in other queues, in my oppinion, is because is simple, shoot and shoot.

I'm not entirely sure if you're trolling here or just naive of the situation. 50 players in CCA is NOTHING compared to what you used to have every evening pre-DR launch. You'd easily see several hundred players in each of the top 5-10 missions along with a variety of other queues running with only minimal wait (how often have you seen Vault Ensnared pop these days?).

Believe me, the queues these days are effectively dead outside of ISA and CCA, with the very occasional smattering of KSA/CSA/Fleet Alert.

I think the first part of your post is a perfect example of the issue here. Whether the majority of players are that way inclined or not, the overwhelming trend is to go towards the quick-fire 2-5 min runs, and avoid anything that last any longer. The game is so grind intensive it seem people are genuinely looking at it more like a time:reward ratio for a job than a game they could enjoy by doing something different.
Part of that is Cryptics issue as they make the content, plus they also make the grind that pushes people to the paths of least resistance. But the players also are to blame as we blindly go along with it.

No trolling intended. I, like most players that run repeatedly those 2 Queues, probably came from other games that keep you occupied with outrageous difficult missions to give you scraps in return. I really wish there were more like crystal fast queues. I played every single mission on the game with 4 toons, and on each of them I read / saw / heard every inch of the story, I really appreciate a good made game, but on the daily stuff, I kinda don't want to spend half hour for 1 rare ore or 1 component for reputation mission.

risian4

lordsteve1 wrote: »

murkalael#7691 wrote: »

I like fast things, for me CCA is the perfect one. No thinking, no requirements, just shoot at will and better part, most times only lasts 2 minutes or less. I hate borgs, and try to avoid complex queues that requires certain conditions to be acomplished and finally I only do ground when tricked to, all my ground gear are mission given most still green MKX (still have an MKVI kit module). So more CCA like queues would increase rotation, You might noticed while most queues are empty, CCA during week you can see 30-50 active players and more on line of waiting, also I see more people on Deep Space Encounter than in other queues, in my oppinion, is because is simple, shoot and shoot.

I'm not entirely sure if you're trolling here or just naive of the situation. 50 players in CCA is NOTHING compared to what you used to have every evening pre-DR launch. You'd easily see several hundred players in each of the top 5-10 missions along with a variety of other queues running with only minimal wait (how often have you seen Vault Ensnared pop these days?).

Believe me, the queues these days are effectively dead outside of ISA and CCA, with the very occasional smattering of KSA/CSA/Fleet Alert.

I think the first part of your post is a perfect example of the issue here. Whether the majority of players are that way inclined or not, the overwhelming trend is to go towards the quick-fire 2-5 min runs, and avoid anything that last any longer. The game is so grind intensive it seem people are genuinely looking at it more like a time:reward ratio for a job than a game they could enjoy by doing something different.
Part of that is Cryptics issue as they make the content, plus they also make the grind that pushes people to the paths of least resistance. But the players also are to blame as we blindly go along with it.

Well said.

We can only hope that, as more players complete their upgrades, they'll start looking for other things - even missions that are less rewarding but something different than the 1000th ISA or CCA - to play.

I've found that, now that I no longer really need the materials or dilithium, I'm more inclined to play stuff such as Azure Nebula, Undine Assault, Gateway to Grethor etc.

Perhaps time gates aren't the best solution, but at least they're ensuring that not every mission is done within 5 minutes. I think that, if they'd address issues such as balance and ensure the viability of different roles and a move away from killing everything, it would also help. If the sole objective in most queues is to kill everything in sight, it's probably not that surprising that people want to be done with it as quickly as possible.

More interesting objectives and tasks, different (non-resource) rewards for different queues and more dynamic gameplay so that missions can be done with players specialising in different things instead of ever-increasing DPS numbers would make other queues a lot more interesting to many people I think. I really enjoy missions such as Undine Assault and Azure Nebula. No need to worry about your DPS vs. others' DPS, and in most of the teams I've been in, everyone just looks for a way to make himself useful, either through supporting someone else, or just focussing on stuff such as closing errant rifts. These missions are almost like ground missions: everyone gets to do his or her own thing, and there's no need to stay with the group and prove yourself or watch everything being vaporised in mere seconds.

That's what makes a mission well designed IMO. And fun to play.

farmallm

Main issue I see. There there is no story progression for it. There is no mention from a mission/FE to say. Go there and finish them off, save something, etc. This is what I liked on WoW. You was giving a reason to go there and do them. As it was part of the story progression. And at the end you got sweet rewards. And completion of a story arc or start of a new one for the next area. I at least tried to do them so I can see the rest of the story. Since STO failed in this area, why should I go for an STF? As I don't have that feeling of completing something or a reason to be there.

I think this would help some as for ones who loves the story. It would give a reason to do them.