Play missions together, hey what a concept!

gizmox64

My fleetmates and I have been playing threw the story arcs with our AoY toon, and have come across a bunch of missions that randomly separate us for no reason. Almost all the Cardassian missions are "solo". Or parts will allow us in space, but not ground, or not in space, but grouped in ground. There's even dialog that has voting in place, and some missions we used to be able to play together, but singe the redo they instance us now.

This is an MMO, we should be able to play every mission together as a team, not this part time MMO BS.
Have the team leader trigger all interaction if the mission was programmed "solo", or better yet fix it.

cmccart

Although I think you came off a little strong, I wholeheartedly agree.

This is a social game, and one of the first bugs any group of people playing this game are bound to find is that group 'questing' is very haphazard at best. From missions getting desynced and dialogue boxes having anomalous rules, to missions just flat-out not working, to enemies scaling ridiculously after a certain rank threshold; grouping needs to work better.

It's not just in the early game, either. All of these problems persist to the late game, and just today, I got sucked into an STF where the group interface never showed up. It was hard being a healer for that one.

themic609

I must admit the game seemed much more social before F2P. I made quite a few friends just by randomly being asked to help do a quest line as a team. I defo agree though, for an MMO it's pretty poor to work as a group/team.

arionisa

I have to wholeheartedly agree also. I played WoW for a long time, not so much because of my love of the game but because a lot of the group I traveled with on my job played it. We could go in with 2-4 of us and run missions/quests together all night long. We even all started brand new toons that we only played when we were together so we stayed the same approximate level.

I play STO because I love the Star trek theme of it, yes it is just as much of a hack and slash (ok, pew, pew, pew) as WoW, but that is just the nature of all MMOs.

That ability to team up with others and spend a night going from mission to mission together is one of the things I wish STO had. Not that I haven't run missions in STO as a team but as already mentioned, the total randomness of whether one team member, or all of them, have to interact with something/someone, along with the number of "solo only" stuff shoved into the middle of things makes that a quite frustrating endeavor.

By the same token, some missions are made in such a way that they practically require team play as beating them solo for most players involves either re spawn after re-spawn after re spawn, or an extremely long drawn out series of hit and run tactics (ie Candle in a hurricane, Last Stand....). And then there are the mission arcs that require you to go right into the middle of a large battlezone, full of seemingly hundreds of re-spawning enemies where hit and run tactics are worthless and team play is about the only way for the average player to get through without endless re spawns.

Some missions, just due to their nature obviously must be run solo, like the "shuttle race", but those missions could be revamped, or just plain replaced to make them group friendly. Not being a programmer I obviously have no first-hand knowledge, but it would seem that with the major parts of the mission already in place, making an existing mission more team friendly would be easier (and less costly) than designing an entirely new mission to replace it with.

I have been playing MMOs of various types since Delta Force: Land Warrior, and the biggest "draw" for almost everyone I have ever talked to/played with in all of them was the team play aspect. I suspect, especially with the console launch coming up soon, team friendliness will help to draw a lot more players to the game. On the flip side of that, one of thee aspects I myself absolutely love about STO is that, with a few notable exceptions, all missions/quests can be run solo if desired, so people like me, who's schedule means quite random play times, and a lot of AFK even when playing, can still enjoy the games main story line without having to wait to be able to team up to progress past the missions that just plain can't be run solo.

No, I am not contradicting myself. I absolutely love team play and will team up any chance I get, although finding team mates who don't mind sitting around doing nothing during the times I have to go AFK is quite difficult. The point I am trying to make is that STO gives you the best of both worlds ..... almost.

You can play the game as a team ...... almost.....except for the portions you can't.

You can play the game solo......almost.....except for those portions the average player can't unless they like re-spawning all the time.

This is an awesome game with great appeal to all ....... almost........

thunderfoot

One of my most favorite things to do in this game is 'ride shotgun' with someone who is just beginning to play or with someone who is leveling a char. I will happily join anyone anywhere anytime if they ask me to team up for a storyline or Foundry mission.

One of the most irritating things in this game is the inability to do so with ALL of the storyline missions.

cmccart

If Cryptic refuses to fix this, they should at the very least add some sort of [solo] tag to missions intended to be performed solo. Of course, the superior and much more favorable option would be to fix multiplayer capability in these missions. I've noticed that cut scenes get desynced all the time in groups. This makes the game look very sloppy.

I also notice that some missions have all of the players vote on dialogue options, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. All missions need to do this, to prevent players from activating objectives and skipping through content before others. It would make for a far more cohesive experience.