[PODCAST] Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 257: Changes

midniteshadow7

Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 257: 'Changes' has warped on to Holosuite Media, you can download and stream it from:
http://holosuitemedia.com/tie257/

Lot of Star Trek news to go through again in this week's episode… we talk about Comcis, Conventions (0:27:04), Star Trek Timelines (0:28:25), Unofficial Productions (0:47:17), Star Trek Online PC news (1:37:49), Star Trek Online Console news (3:45:31), Community Feedback (4:01:21) and more!

Community Questions:
1. What do you think about the space changes in Star Trek Online that we've seen so far on the Tribble server and discussed in this episode?
2. What new features would like to have introduced into Star Trek Timelines version 1.8 that's due out soon?

alex1ger

Good evening, tribbles.

No time for novels, so let's go.


Community question:


1.) See, these changes are a band-aid. Well, maybe a full-blown compression bandage to stop the bleeding and that would be great if you were bleeding profusely. Unfortunately the balancing problem is more like... a brain tumor. You don't need a compression bandage, you need some very careful and dare I say... delicate brain surgery. And Cryptic either can't or won't do that.

The underlying problem is rather simple... Cryptic implemented "a" trinity.
Look at engineering's miracle worker. What does it do? It keeps you alive.
What does science's dampening field (or is it scattering field?) do? It keeps the team alive. Or if subnucleonic beam was the better comparison: buff/debuff management is a staple of "support" classes. Deflector overload looks like a dmg/healing cooldown. Okay, that works for "support" just as well.
Now look at tactical's attack pattern alpha. What does it do? RAWR! DMG! I'M GONNA PWN UR FACES!

Cryptic implemented "the trinity", but they decided NOT to enforce it. And that's the core issue (not the only one, but I had too much on my plate the last few weeks to get that e-mail done. -.- ).
There are games out there that allow you to play any combination of "roles" in "easy mode", but when you get to their versions of "advanced" and "elite", they enforce "the trinity" (and they usually require pre-made groups for "elite", but whatever...).
As long as tacticals can survive just fine, engineers and scientists have no chance of ever "catching up". If they did, their higher survivability would make them just plain better.

If Cryptic did not want to enforce "the trinity", they should not have implemented it. They could have gotten creative, but they chose not to. All of these issues are self-made. And none of this is rocket science. Now FIXING this mess, THAT might turn into rocket science. But that's true for all balancing attempts in any game out there.



2.) Looks like some sort of formatting error occured on your end, because there is only one community question.