[PODCAST] 317 – A PLEASANT ENGAGE-MENT | PRIORITY ONE: A RODDENBERRY STAR TREK PODCAST

fynncobb

Greetings, Captains! You’re listening to EPISODE 317 OF PRIORITY ONE PODCAST, your weekly report on all things Star Trek! Recorded LIVE on Thursday, May 11th, 2017 and available for download or streaming on Monday, May 15th at PriorityOnePodcast.com!


This week, we Trek Out what William Shatner is up to, some bold concepts for star trek inspired vehicles, we celebrate Jerry Goldsmith’s career, and Jonathan Frakes psyched us all out. In Star Trek Online News, there are a couple of events on Xbox One and Playstation 4, the First Contact Day writing competition winners have been announced, and we’re discussing fleet projects.

And as always, before we wrap up the show, we’ll open hailing frequencies for your incoming messages!

TOPICS DISCUSSED

• Trek It Out
  • Is William Shatner ready to play Captain Kirk again?
  • Zero-G flight with William Shatner and Roddenberry Adventures
  • Star Trek starships redesigned as cars
  • Jerry Goldsmith received posthumous star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame
  • Jonathan Frakes trolls us all, promptly kills our dreams
• Star Trek Online News
  • Engage: The Official Star Trek Podcast
  • (Console) Crystalline Cataclysm: 11 May to 1 June
  • (Console) Elachi Sheshar Dreadnought Cruiser R&D pack promo: 11 May to 1 June
  • First Contact Day Writing Contest winners
  • Tutorial: Duty Officer Grinding
  • Winters’s Top Tip
    • Diplomat Uniform
    • Commendation: Diplomatic
  • Other Gaming News
    • Voice commands coming to Star Trek: Bridge Crew VR this summer

THIS WEEK’S COMMUNITY QUESTIONS

• Would you like to see William Shatner reprise his role as Captain Kirk?
• Have you run into issues with completing fleet projects? What are some workarounds that you’ve found, and what do you think Cryptic could change to make it less of an issue?

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tylermaxwell

Would you like to see William Shatner reprise his role as Captain Kirk?
CON-TRACT NEH-GOH-TIA-AAA-TOR!!! (*Insert Shat's hammy karate chopping here*)

Sure, I'd enjoy seeing Bill Shatner make a cameo in, say, the next Kelvin Trek movie; not sure that they could fit him in Discovery, not without some extra weird time travel/alternate universe stuff. Better yet, it'd be great if he did some VO work for Star Trek Online. They should bring him back as Mirror Kirk! I believe one of the story ideas that Enterprise had before their demise was to bring Shatner back as Kirk, but from the MI-RROR UNIVERSE! (<-- *booming, ominous sounding voice here*) After the events of "Mirror, Mirror", Goatee Spock in his rise to become Emperor uses the Tantalus Field on his Captain Kirk, which (unknown to everyone who used the device) actually sent him to an isolated prison planet in the Prime Universe in the distant past. Archer and the Enterprise would just happen across them, an aged Mirror Kirk leads an uprising and disaster ensues. Take that plot, but place it instead in STO's timeframe. And players have to use their best faux-martial arts skills to fight Mirror Kirk.


Have you run into issues with completing fleet projects? What are some workarounds that you’ve found, and what do you think Cryptic could change to make it less of an issue?
Buckle up, this is gonna be a long ride. Feel free to skip to the end if you don't want to drudge through this seemingly rambling nonsense.

One of the problems behind fleet dilithium contributions is that while everyone knows that the fleet needs dilithium, no one wants to give THEIR dilithium to the fleet projects. The reason is that it conflicts with all the other things that players want to get with their dilithium: things like reputation gear, R&D upgrading, and most importantly, the ALMIGHTY ZEN DOLLAR!!! You only get 8k dilithium per day (9k I think with the Veteran+Dil Mine extra assignments) per character, so if you had the choice between giving loads of your hard-earned* dil to a fleet project, or saving it up for that sweeeet new T6 ship that you've been ogling, 9 times of of 10 you'd probably go for the ship. Therefore, not many peeps are giving up their dil to projects, and fleet progress stalls.

Now, hyper-grinder wisdom would tell you that the answer to this problem would be to make more and more characters specifically for dil and resource farming; earn 8k dil on one character, switch characters, earn 8k dil, switch, rinse and repeat until you've gotten all the dil you wanted, or finally stop when you're sick of all that tedious repetition. A good portion of the dilithium that is donated to a lot of fleets actually probably comes from players making dedicated farming alt accounts (which might be a grey area in the game rules, maybe...); that dilithium is then donated to the player's fleet, leaving their main account's dilithium free to use on C-Store ship unlocks, master keys, etc. Of course if you don't have several extra hours a day (or don't want to) spend on that sort of grinding, that doesn't work for you.

An interesting note is that a lot of the more 'casual' players actually do earn more than 8k unrefined dil per day, but on a single or a few characters a day (between DOffing, Admiralty, PvE/Battlezones, etc., it's not hard), so they can't refine any more than the 8k. There's at least a few reasons why these players would continue playing on a single/few chars even when they can't do anything with the excess dil; they might really like RP-ing the one character, or they don't want to spend the time to setup one or more alts just for the purpose of resource farming (it does take a nontrivial amount of time to optimize a new char for endgame resource farming). Unfortunately these leaves these casuals/low-alt players at a significant disadvantage to the more hardcore alt-grinders, who in the same time span (several hours of gameplay) are likely earning 10-30x that per day through massive alt farming. As a result, a lot of the game balance is then skewed to what the hyper-grinders are doing instead of the casuals (possibly 'cuz all the dev metrics see is "the playerbase as a whole earns lots of dilithium"), leading to the 6-7 figure contribution meters that the grinders can fill in days or even hours, but might take weeks or months for a group of casual players. So while the grinders can swim through piles of dil like Scrooge McDuck and almost never feel the pain of fleet contributions (supposedly there are players in this game who've built and sustained entire solo fleets just by themselves with their alts), the casuals are stuck with their meager earnings trying to choose between their gear requirements, Zen purchases, and donating to their fleet. And the last one usually loses out.

Addressing this kind of resource disparity without too much disruption, gnashing of teeth and rage is likely an ENORMOUS task, maybe even an impossible one. But perhaps there's at least some things to be done to give casuals a leg up and even the playing field. One solution to this could be to add a separate 'Fleet-only Dilithium' daily refinement option, for example 10k a day of Fleet-only dil. This would be apart from the normal 8k a day dilithium refinement, so players can save up for their desired ships and gear, etc., while still being able to give dilithium to progress their fleets.

As far as Duty Officers...ih, I kinda see that as 'Working As Intended^(TM)', as least as far as the "getting DOffs takes time and effort" part is concerned. Though to be fair I say that as a longtime DOffing aficionado. There are plenty of Duty Officer recruitment assignments in the game if you know where to look, though that means traveling around the galaxy a bit (It's EXPLORATION !!!). There's Personnel Officers at Starfleet and Klingon academies with assignments that give you a number of Common quality (or rarer) DOffs. Then there's the Asylum assignments: you give a certain planet a refugee, and they'll give you a member of their species for your DOff crew, anything from Uncommon to Very Rare. "Where do you get refugees", you ask? You can usually find Common quality refugees on the Exchange for peanuts, or you can get them as a reward from a success on one of the repeatable Support Colonization assignments in the exploration clusters. You can also get DOffs from the Fleet Starbase, though that costs fleet credits. And if you don't want to spend the time to do any of that, but can spend some EC to buy them from other players on the Exchange, that seems like a sensible trade off. Working the DOff system takes time and patience, but can be quite rewarding.

A final point: Just make the Starbase "Unload Surplus Fleet Marks" project give full fleet credits instead of half. There's no good reason for that half penalty anymore. You can't even slot the project before the Starbase reaches T5 anyways, so it makes no sense. If the point is to 'encourage' players to contribute to other projects in Fleet Holdings before just slotting the one Surplus project, they're already doing that. Why? 'Cuz the players want the fleet provisions or gear/holding unlocks, which means folks will fill those projects anyways; all the half-penalty does is bottleneck players with Fleet Marks to spare from being able to use them, since the marks quota on all the other projects are filled, and no one wants half the credits for the same amount of marks turned in.

TL;DR? (Of course you didn't, unless you're a self-punishing type {1}. ) Here's the bullet points:

• Fleets have a dilithium problem because most players will save their dil for other stuff, like new gear and Zen purchases.
• Casual players (~1-3 characters) are at a tremendous dil-earning disadvantage compared to the more hardcore grinders (10+ characters/accounts, etc).
• Giving players a separate 'Fleet-only Dilithium' refinement would allow more players to give dil to their fleets without taking away from their own personal dil stockpiles.
• Duty Officers aren't hard to get if you know where to look (Personnel Officers at faction academies, Asylum DOff assignments, among others).
• "Surplus Fleet Marks" project should just give players full fleet credits. The half-credit penalty is pointless.

{1} Edit, 'cuz apparently an 'ma' word triggers the profanity filter. Mmkay.