So you want a particular type of mark or elite mark, you are trying to get a 4pc rep set and it'll cost you several thousand marks?
Yeah me too! But this particular mark is only received through participating in a PvE queue. Okay, you check the queues on and off but soon find the queues you would like to play often times have zero to one other player qued up at the times you are usually on. You can't do them.
What do you do then? Learn to live without that rep set you had your heart on?
A common lament players have is "the queues are dead". Well here is one idea to solve that problem.
When you click "join" for a queue and it doesnt have enough players, after some period of time of no more joining players that game places you in the queue with randomly generated npc bots. The game has a catalog of all the npc ships you've met throught the game, it will be a random draw of who shows up to play with you. And their effectiveness will be the same as when you have npc allies in an episode. In an episode they are not very effective in actually killing ships, you end up doing the brunt of the work, but at least they draw fire and perhaps cast debuffs. You end up at least finishing the queue and getting your marks/elite marks.
There. Now you can proceed at berating me and ripping me a new one.
Thank you for your time.
Comments
a multipurpose mark (couldnt think of a better name)
A mark and device you can choose from as a reward at the end of a queue , which can be used for any rep for all items
Oooh i like crash is that the new EKG fleet console that restarts a queue after its died?
Its a lot of computing horsepower to get to the goal.
Might be better served by making a specifically 1-player que/scenario for each elite mark type and cap it at once per day. More upfront work creating the 5-or-so missions in the first place, but less server bloat. Get bored waiting for the 5-man to pop? Go spin one of those up, so you're making metrics friendly progress.
Haven't we been around long enough to outgrow that tired old MMO Trope of needing four other people to do anything.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
My character Tsin'xing
PublicEliteSTF is a good place to start. If you parse high enough damage numbers, you'll get invited to the DPS channels which will make it even easier to find team mates.
Salazaraze, thanks for the tip for channels!
Yeah I was going to say, aren't there already the aforementioned options to go and get these without ever having to step into an STF queue?
What marks are we talking about here?
Which marks specifically aren't available? The Nakhul Red Alert I think offers everything right?
Romulan: New Romulus
Nukara: nukara...
Borg: Defera
Voth: Solanae BZ
Undine: Solanae BZ
Delta: Kobali
Iconian: Kobali
Terran: Terran BZ
which kinda leaves just temporal.
My character Tsin'xing
1) Nakhul alerts provide any kind of mark. I never tried those.
2) You can repeat the two missions on the Kobali ground zone for iconian marks, Breaking the Wall and With Our Last Breath, but appearently i have to do At The Gates and The Last Stand in order to get to them from what the Stowiki says. Seems like a lot to get what prolly is a spit drop of marks.
Ill look at those but i stand by my idea, and there are a couple of more ideas here about the STF's.
My character Tsin'xing
Yeah, that's how it ends up being worth it to do that. You get the elite mark, AND the daily bonus makes it worth doing once per day.
This mostly just ends up being a time gated grind. You do one or two activities each day and it takes you 14 days or whatever. That's it really.
I myself don't like doing that particular piece of content, so to get the Iconian sets I am stubborn and just wait for Gateway to Grethor Advanced to pop. But I know it's me being stubborn so I can only blame myself, hahahah.
you'd still would not address the problem at its core, which is that there are easy queues and hard queues. A combination of what you proposed and an hourly event promoting your suggested reward for a one or two specific queues that would maybe work.
Personally I'd like to scrap the old fleet actions and make them red alerts, that are significantly shorter. Examples would be, Gorn/federation minefield, klingon scout force, Starbase 24, breaking the planet, etc.
additional XP rewards, 2-3 different mark selection and so on...
What is needed is a reason for people to actually bother queuing for things repeatedly and continue to do so once they have all their rep gear.
It's needs to be some sort of increased reward/prize that people can't say no to that draws them back all the time. And it has to draw them to different places in order to keep all the queues popular.
So in this case something like a weekly rotation of X different random queues that offer double rewards, or some other shiny like tech upgrades or something. Have the game randomly pick 2-3 queues (one normal, one advanced, one elite) and double or treble their payouts so that people get drawn in to play them, even if they don't normally.
Bang...less played queues get more runs and rewards are higher pulling people in to use their time doing something they wouldn't normally do.
playing around with dilithium is definately something I would advice the devs to not do...devaluating dilithium even further would have a negative impact on the hole f2p business model.
at this point I think offering increased XP, like the red alerts do is a more viable option...
There was already a queue rotation in place when the game went f2p...it really populated otherwise underpopulated queues. I think going back to an idea that was already in the game and worked at the time is atleast worth a (re)try.
Enough said