[PODCAST] Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 248: What We Reckon

midniteshadow7

Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 248: What We Reckon has warped on to Holosuite Media, you can download and stream it from:

http://holosuitemedia.com/tie248/

With the annoucement of Star Trek Online's Season 12 there is a lot for our crew to discuss including the usual Star Trek Online Console news (1:25:21). We also have news from Star Trek Timelines (1:29:02), Star Trek News (1:35:13), Listener Feedback (1:50:05) and more!


Community Questions:
1. What do you think so far about the announced information for Star Trek Online's Season 12?
2. What would you like to see in year 2 of Star Trek Timelines?
3. What do you think of the NX-refit picture released by MassivelyOP?
4. Do you think there should be klingon-only ship sales in the next year for Star Trek Online?

alex1ger

Okay guys, I'm really late this week, so I'll try to be brief...



Community questions:

1.) Season 12 itself sounds like it's gonna be just another season. Something something system (this time around crafting), something something new exciting *yawns* story arc, something something Trek actor (because voice actors are not worthy of mention, unless they did some "real" acting in their own fan production...)
So the only "unusual" part seems to be that it launches alongside the anniversary. "Usually" Cryptic tries to spread their "content" much thinner than this. I'm not sure what to make of this. So let's wait for the anniversary infographic. Yes, Cryptic, I am intently waiting for that one. Make it count...

2.) Okay, this time around you're gonna get a real answer. I don't want anything anymore. As long as the tribbles crew was still excited about it and the Timelines people were showing up for an interview I was willing to take a look. But there was no browser version and then the tribbles crew started getting a little less excited and then even MidNite, the eternal optimist, stopped subscribing to that game. I think I won't need a browser version anymore. So thanks, Timelines.

3.) See, it's not just a touch-up when it comes to the textures of a ship. The whole engineering section is a new part. They had to touch the model or even make a new model from scratch. I sincerely doubt they would do that without turning around and trying to sell it to us. And since the T6 Konnie and the T6 Connie broke all reason and logic that might still have lingered around... this is probably gonna be a T6 NX-class refit. And it WILL be able to use the old skin because OF COURSE IT WILL!
Moving on...

4.) There won't be. I'm not sure if there should be, but there won't be, so I think I'm done here.



Feedback:


zombee's suggestion to get people to play the least-played queues:
Okay, that particular suggestion seems too complicated to me. Especially when there is a solution out there. World of Warcraft's "dungeon browser" or however you wanna call it allows you to queue for a dungeon (or heroic dungeon) of your choice. But that's not the default setting. The default setting is... queue for RANDOM dungeon (or random heroic dungeon).
And if you use this default option you get a reward when you complete the dungeon.
What kind of reward? Doesn't matter, because STO is a different game with a different economy. Figuring out a reward for "STO's awesome random Q!" and whether or not the existing rewards would have to be changed for this to work is a job for the devs.
But if you do have any questions, just ask Timber. I mean, WoW's random dungeon finder has existed for so many years now and the rewards have been tweaked a few times. So, it's not just a "pie in the sky" suggestion, it's a tried and true feature.


Okay, there were a few more things I wanted to talk about or mention, but time's running out, so maybe next week. I'm not entirely sure. Btw., have you decided if there's gonna be a show next week (because of the season 12 livestream) or do you have an idea when we're gonna get an announcement?


Oh... right... The season 12 livestream. Yes, it is more than odd that you keep people from playing that supposedly awesome new content that just launched. I understand preview streams or launch streams or streams when the excitement is about to wind down, but the timing of this one seems odd to me. Oh well, good luck.

alex1ger

Feedback, part 2:

Okay, let's dive right in.



Dilithium discussion:
Okay, so... why does the refinement cap exist?

It's a control/gate/safeguard mechanism.
What do I mean by that? Cryptic can control/limit how quickly a player can acquire this premium currency. Why is that good? Well, it helps with the pricing. It should be "challenging" to acquire for a veteran player/subscriber while still being "reasonable" to acquire for a new/F2P player.

The fact that those "Wealth of Khan" uhm... Wrath of Khan costumes are so extremely costly... well, I'd call that a failure on Cryptic's part. If people earn and hoard THAT much dilithium, you're either not offering enough things to spend dilithium on or the things you're offering are not enticing enough.
Hoarded dilithium helps absolutely nobody.

Now let's talk about the "safeguard" part. The refinement cap exists to make sure that even if there was an exploit that gave you "unlimited" dilithium, you couldn't just crash the dilithium economy.
I mean, imagine there was that kind of an exploit and no safeguard and whoever used the exploit waited til... after the devs left for the weekend or even worse the christmas holidays.
Nobody in the house to immediately fix it?
Emergency shutdown of the dilithium exchange!
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

That would be rather bad for everyone involved (including Cryptic) and therefore I do not believe they will ever allow you to use unrefined dilithium.
Then what about raising the cap? Well, like I mentioned, the cap exists for a couple of reasons and they will not increase the cap on a whim. I mean, more than a year ago, CaptainGeko was asked about raising the cap and he said he didn't see any issues with raising it to a nice and clean 10k per day (per character). Now, that was NOT a promise or an announcement. He was asked a question and without having access to the almighty metrics, he went with his gut instinct.
Since that was more than a year ago and nothing happened... they're either still investigating it or it probably won't happen in the foreseeable future.

And don't forget that Cryptic said more than once that the majority of the playerbase does not even reach the cap on a regular basis... All the people who get to the cap on a daily basis? Minority. The people who have millions of unrefined dilithium? Even smaller minority.
So if you really have THAT much time on your hands... play another character (or two or five) and use those respective refinement caps, too.

Now @sunseahl 's suggestion about the dilithium mine offering fleet dilithium vouchers for doing "fleet activities"... that might be feasible. See, when World of Warcraft (I'm sorry, but that game just happened to change how MMOs work...) dabbled in guild advancement, they included things like... If a guild group (at least 3 out of the 5 group members had to be guild members to qualify as a guild group) completes a heroic dungeon, a nice chunk of gold would go directly into the guild bank. The limit on that was... 7 per week? And there were similar rewards for doing "guild group" PvP or "guild raid" raids.
Just for your information... World of Warcraft decided later on that it was not worth the effort trying to balance guild advancement for both hardcore raiding guilds and casual guilds of friends.

Long story short, the cap protects the dilithium economy (and Cryptic's wallet) from potential exploits, so IF they do touch it, they will do so very... gingerly. And it allows them to throw all this free content (and unrefined dilithium) at players, which makes them look generous. Yes, they don't bully you into subscribing (like a certain other F2P MMO likes to do), but you have to pay for it by having to deal with the dilithium refinement cap.



Ferengi:

Okay, sun, Cryptic DID and DID NOT listen to you. Cryptic did not just use one ferengi. They used three. Farek in the gamma quadrant, Madran in the beta (and now alpha) quadrant and Qwen in the delta quadrant.
But effectively they are all the same ferengi.

I would argue that Farek was the least harmful of the trio infernale, so blowing her up seems rather disproportionate in retrospect.

I mean, Qwen put a bounty on our heads. And when we meet him in "Time in a bottle", we just let him go? Wait, what?
Nog, that guy tried to get us killed, we should arrest him! No acknowledgement of that predicament? Oh well, let's see when he'll show up again. Oh... on Risa. And we look for these temporal artifacts and just hand them over to him. Wait, WHAT?

Sure, you can argue that Madran needs to die (I'd rather put him in jail and "misplace" the key in a probe that gets launched into the nearest star), but in my opinion Qwen is the worst of the trio and since he's an NPC on Risa now... Yeah.



STO's awesome random Q!
You know, when I made that suggestion (and used that name), I didn't think much of it. It seemed so... obvious to me, because I know of (and have used) that feature since... when did Wrath of the Lich King launch? November 2008. Uhm... Yeah...
When I logged in today to get the giveaway items, I actually opened STO's queue window and the fact that there was no random button baffled me.

I mean, I remember Cryptic taking stuff out of the game and turning it into events. And their whole "We don't want do divide the playerbase any further." Okay... Great... Stop DIVIDING your players into x different queues. Make a random button, "encourage" players to use it. No more least played queue. DONE.

Sure, they might have to think about whether or not players should be able to "blacklist" certain queues and whether or not they should have a "random space queue" button and a "random ground queue" button or if it should be completely random (and more rewarding) instead? And if an overwhelming majority of players "blacklists" the same queue, then take it out of the rotation and rework it, because something is clearly wrong with it. Or try what WoW tried with the heroic Lich King dungeon "The oculus". Maybe Timberwolf remembers that one?
Throw in even more rewards when people get (randomly) matched into and complete that particular queue.

But the sheer fact that there is no random button just... I can't wrap my brain around that. It is so obvious!
If you make that random button you can even change the weightings. So you could make new queues pop up more often for a certain amount of time. Or rotate queues in and out every few weeks to mix things up.