You're looking at overall time spent but not when it was spent or the number of days.
Cryptic wants you to participate in the Summer 2016 event by logging in at least 25 times during Summer 2016, not to have earned 960 shinies in 2015 and then only show up for 1 day.
Let us study the case of a player working from a blank slate, who picks up all available vouchers each year (40 daily * 40 days = 1600), and requisitions each available ship.
The ability to save up for the future is a strong incentive to collect all available vouchers, which in turn bolsters these 'metrics'. Now, if the ship available for a given year does not interest the player for whatever reason, there are still those extra projects which turn those vouchers into useful resources.
Conversely this 'exclusivity' nonsense discourages collecting extras, which in turn hurts 'metrics'. I, among others, think exclusivity here should be limited to items of a purely cosmetic nature, if present at all, and reiterate the idea of a special 'shield' which gives the ship a special hull pattern (and fits only in that ship's shield visual slot) which is only available in the debut year.
You're looking at overall time spent but not when it was spent or the number of days.
Cryptic wants you to participate in the Summer 2016 event by logging in at least 25 times during Summer 2016, not to have earned 960 shinies in 2015 and then only show up for 1 day.
Let us study the case of a player working from a blank slate, who picks up all available vouchers each year (40 daily * 40 days = 1600), and requisitions each available ship.
The ability to save up for the future is a strong incentive to collect all available vouchers, which in turn bolsters these 'metrics'. Now, if the ship available for a given year does not interest the player for whatever reason, there are still those extra projects which turn those vouchers into useful resources.
Conversely this 'exclusivity' nonsense discourages collecting extras, which in turn hurts 'metrics'. I, among others, think exclusivity here should be limited to items of a purely cosmetic nature, if present at all, and reiterate the idea of a special 'shield' which gives the ship a special hull pattern (and fits only in that ship's shield visual slot) which is only available in the debut year.
You're missing alts. with 3 alts I could have each earn 1000 shinies in year 1 and skip Risa completely for the next 2 years.
You're looking at overall time spent but not when it was spent or the number of days.
Cryptic wants you to participate in the Summer 2016 event by logging in at least 25 times during Summer 2016, not to have earned 960 shinies in 2015 and then only show up for 1 day.
Let us study the case of a player working from a blank slate, who picks up all available vouchers each year (40 daily * 40 days = 1600), and requisitions each available ship.
The ability to save up for the future is a strong incentive to collect all available vouchers, which in turn bolsters these 'metrics'. Now, if the ship available for a given year does not interest the player for whatever reason, there are still those extra projects which turn those vouchers into useful resources.
Conversely this 'exclusivity' nonsense discourages collecting extras, which in turn hurts 'metrics'. I, among others, think exclusivity here should be limited to items of a purely cosmetic nature, if present at all, and reiterate the idea of a special 'shield' which gives the ship a special hull pattern (and fits only in that ship's shield visual slot) which is only available in the debut year.
You're missing alts. with 3 alts I could have each earn 1000 shinies in year 1 and skip Risa completely for the next 2 years.
I did that with the anniversarys. Before they added date stamps I had enough anniversary tokens saved up for the next DECADE.
Event tokens continue to be 'stamped' with the year, meaning no one can pre-save for next years events and Cryptic/PWE get their metrics
Each years tokens can be applied to previous years' projects which remain as account unlocks, meaning the same amount of overall time played is still required to unlock those ships (continuing to add to the previous metric)
The Lobi option remains open to those who don't finish the ship project and don't want/are unable to wait the full year until the event comes around again
The buyback store is updated to allow the previous years stamped tokens to be used as currency, possibly through some form of conversion (from 'Lohlunat Prize Voucher xxxx' to 'Lohlunat Pearls' for example), giving 'pre savers' or 'super grindy' people some measure of value to continuing to play the event
I'm sure someone on the business side of things will grumble about 'potential lost profits' from being able to source the free ship through continued free means, but those are profits not yet earned and frankly, if you upset your player base through this, they're profits you might not ever see...
Maybe I'm not reading this correctly, but these two statements seem to contradict one another. So do you mean to convert the event tokens to some other non-ship earning currency like "Lohlunat Favors' or "Andorian Sleigh Bells" etc?
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
Now, if the ship available for a given year does not interest the player for whatever reason, there are still those extra projects which turn those vouchers into useful resources.
Except that those projects don't unlock unless you've already claimed the ship, and iirc, are on 20 hour cooldowns in addition to only being available during the event in question. Further to that, the buyback store as it currently exists doesn't allow the excess 2015 vouchers to be spent either.
Event tokens continue to be 'stamped' with the year, meaning no one can pre-save for next years events and Cryptic/PWE get their metrics
The buyback store is updated to allow the previous years stamped tokens to be used as currency, possibly through some form of conversion (from 'Lohlunat Prize Voucher xxxx' to 'Lohlunat Pearls' for example), giving 'pre savers' or 'super grindy' people some measure of value to continuing to play the event
Maybe I'm not reading this correctly, but these two statements seem to contradict one another. So do you mean to convert the event tokens to some other non-ship earning currency like "Lohlunat Favors' or "Andorian Sleigh Bells" etc?
I don't think I made the latter point clear but that was amended in my second attempt:
Event tokens continue to be 'stamped' with the year, meaning no one can pre-save for next years events and Cryptic/PWE get their metrics
Previous years' ships, which remain as account unlocks, can be bought with a buyback currency (continuing to add to the previous metric, see below re. currency)
Each years tokens can be turned into a buyback currency through the buyback store, possibly being kept separate as Q's/Summer/Winter currencies, at a rate of 3:1, giving 'pre savers' or 'super grindy' people some measure of value to continuing to play the event. Keeping previous ships at a cost of '1000' increases the play-through metric for not being at the original event while not making other buyback items too cheap to obtain through Lobi
The buyback store must be re-opened each year by visiting the event map, possibly with 1x Lohlunat Favor, 1x each 'common' winter store commodity, 1x Omega Trace or some other easily obtained commodity with very little intrinsic value
The Lobi option remains open to those who don't finish the ship project and don't want/are unable to wait the full year until the event comes around again, who wish to buy the ship through various Lobi-obtaining means or who wish to buy other buyback store items
Might be worth reading the whole post I quoted the list from though for context.
What everyone buying Zen are really saying while all these bugs are still floating freely:
Stop new content until quality returns
You're looking at overall time spent but not when it was spent or the number of days.
Cryptic wants you to participate in the Summer 2016 event by logging in at least 25 times during Summer 2016, not to have earned 960 shinies in 2015 and then only show up for 1 day.
Let us study the case of a player working from a blank slate, who picks up all available vouchers each year (40 daily * 40 days = 1600), and requisitions each available ship.
The ability to save up for the future is a strong incentive to collect all available vouchers, which in turn bolsters these 'metrics'. Now, if the ship available for a given year does not interest the player for whatever reason, there are still those extra projects which turn those vouchers into useful resources.
Conversely this 'exclusivity' nonsense discourages collecting extras, which in turn hurts 'metrics'. I, among others, think exclusivity here should be limited to items of a purely cosmetic nature, if present at all, and reiterate the idea of a special 'shield' which gives the ship a special hull pattern (and fits only in that ship's shield visual slot) which is only available in the debut year.
You're missing alts. with 3 alts I could have each earn 1000 shinies in year 1 and skip Risa completely for the next 2 years.
I did that with the anniversarys. Before they added date stamps I had enough anniversary tokens saved up for the next DECADE.
Exactly. Enough people were alt-ing and hoarding that it showed up on Cryptic's radar as an exploit and so we got year-specific currency.
If they are giving away an endgame, cross-faction, account-wide ship free for a little grinding they get to set some strict rules.
I have the answer to this whole problem. With all this temporal/time travel stuff going on, why can't our captains just go back through time and do the events when they were originally happening? There's got to be an Iconian gateway, or something like it, around here somewhere. Slingshot around the sun? We should be able to use the USS Pastak admiralty ship to do this. See? Time travel, problem solved.
Exactly. Enough people were alt-ing and hoarding that it showed up on Cryptic's radar as an exploit and so we got year-specific currency.
That's a funny definition of 'exploit', considering we're talking about players actually putting in the work to earn that currency, as opposed to finding some way to genuinely cheat.
If they are giving away an endgame, cross-faction, account-wide ship free for a little grinding they get to set some strict rules.
See, here's the thing: I (and many others, I would guess) have no problem putting in the work (or, for that matter, caring if we get X ship a couple years after most everyone else). It's the removing of choices of what the resulting income can be invested in that makes no sense.
Exactly. Enough people were alt-ing and hoarding that it showed up on Cryptic's radar as an exploit and so we got year-specific currency.
That's a funny definition of 'exploit', considering we're talking about players actually putting in the work to earn that currency, as opposed to finding some way to genuinely cheat.
If they are giving away an endgame, cross-faction, account-wide ship free for a little grinding they get to set some strict rules.
See, here's the thing: I (and many others, I would guess) have no problem putting in the work (or, for that matter, caring if we get X ship a couple years after most everyone else). It's the removing of choices of what the resulting income can be invested in that makes no sense.
Cryptic does not consider it as X hours of work. They are paying you with a $50 ship for X days of logins during this specific event. Not the year before, not just one day of super-grinding this year. X days this year.
They give you the $50 ship because if players as a group login for 25 days, they play the game enough that some of them spend money. Much more money than if they could grind out the ship over one weekend or using alts. They also let you get it instantly using lobi since that translates into real-world spending too.
Spending money is what keeps the servers running and pays for new content, so I'm fine with them using the 25 days of logins as a requirement to get the $50 ship free.
Exactly. Enough people were alt-ing and hoarding that it showed up on Cryptic's radar as an exploit and so we got year-specific currency.
That's a funny definition of 'exploit', considering we're talking about players actually putting in the work to earn that currency, as opposed to finding some way to genuinely cheat.
If they are giving away an endgame, cross-faction, account-wide ship free for a little grinding they get to set some strict rules.
See, here's the thing: I (and many others, I would guess) have no problem putting in the work (or, for that matter, caring if we get X ship a couple years after most everyone else). It's the removing of choices of what the resulting income can be invested in that makes no sense.
Enh... I'm happy with the stack of loot I got as a consolation prize for the expiration of my 10k+ anniversary vouchers. Realistically I was never going to use them all anyways. Each year every character picked up 400+ and ONE character spent 1000.
It's good to see Cryptic/PWE learned nothing from the last time you pulled a stunt like this and introduced the whole "exclusivity" mechanic.
For what it's worth I think it would have been better for all concerned if you had made this announcement now as you have done BUT with the changes taking effect as from after the 2016 Summer Event. This would constitute fair notice that things were going to change going forward, with the 2016 Summer Event being a "Last Chance" for those that had been planning to complete any slotted projects by participating in the 2016 Summer Event aka playing the game.
Don't be surprised by the $h1t storm that's likely to follow this announcement! It's not necessarily what you're doing but how you're doing it.
Comments
- Year 1: 0 (reserve) + 1600 (collected) - 1000 (ship) = 600 (available)
- Year 2: 600 + 1600 - 1000 = 1200
- Year 3: 1200 + 1600 - 1000 = 1800
- et ectera, et cetera, et cetera (thank you, Mr Brenner)
The ability to save up for the future is a strong incentive to collect all available vouchers, which in turn bolsters these 'metrics'. Now, if the ship available for a given year does not interest the player for whatever reason, there are still those extra projects which turn those vouchers into useful resources.Conversely this 'exclusivity' nonsense discourages collecting extras, which in turn hurts 'metrics'. I, among others, think exclusivity here should be limited to items of a purely cosmetic nature, if present at all, and reiterate the idea of a special 'shield' which gives the ship a special hull pattern (and fits only in that ship's shield visual slot) which is only available in the debut year.
You're missing alts. with 3 alts I could have each earn 1000 shinies in year 1 and skip Risa completely for the next 2 years.
My character Tsin'xing
Except that those projects don't unlock unless you've already claimed the ship, and iirc, are on 20 hour cooldowns in addition to only being available during the event in question. Further to that, the buyback store as it currently exists doesn't allow the excess 2015 vouchers to be spent either.
I don't think I made the latter point clear but that was amended in my second attempt:
Might be worth reading the whole post I quoted the list from though for context.
Stop new content until quality returns
Exactly. Enough people were alt-ing and hoarding that it showed up on Cryptic's radar as an exploit and so we got year-specific currency.
If they are giving away an endgame, cross-faction, account-wide ship free for a little grinding they get to set some strict rules.
My character Tsin'xing
See, here's the thing: I (and many others, I would guess) have no problem putting in the work (or, for that matter, caring if we get X ship a couple years after most everyone else). It's the removing of choices of what the resulting income can be invested in that makes no sense.
Cryptic does not consider it as X hours of work. They are paying you with a $50 ship for X days of logins during this specific event. Not the year before, not just one day of super-grinding this year. X days this year.
They give you the $50 ship because if players as a group login for 25 days, they play the game enough that some of them spend money. Much more money than if they could grind out the ship over one weekend or using alts. They also let you get it instantly using lobi since that translates into real-world spending too.
Spending money is what keeps the servers running and pays for new content, so I'm fine with them using the 25 days of logins as a requirement to get the $50 ship free.
My character Tsin'xing
I second this!