Yeah in the couple hours I might have to play, my choice is doff/admiralty on my 8 toons for max rewards or have 'fun' pew-pewing and make next to nothing. I usually take the rewards and maybe do a little pew pew before logging off.
Sometimes I think I play STO just to have something to complain about on the forums.
Compare that to when the sets were rare drops and everyone wanted to get them just to have them.
Yeah I think this should come back at some point. Preferably a consumable of sorts. It can be unique 1x Admiralty cards or token passes for example. Something useful enough that people would want them for various reasons that is uniquely rewarded for each queue. Rare enough to make them sought after, yet common enough not to be frustrating to acquire.
1x cards or pass tokens are neither unique nor particularly interesting. Consumables in general tend to be junk in STO.
I'd go with gear, clothes, etc.
If it were gear/clothes or whatever you can own for the lifetime of your character, then it might also be good to make drops character bound on equip. That should encourage replays because of the chance to trade them.
Compare that to when the sets were rare drops and everyone wanted to get them just to have them.
Yeah I think this should come back at some point. Preferably a consumable of sorts. It can be unique 1x Admiralty cards or token passes for example. Something useful enough that people would want them for various reasons that is uniquely rewarded for each queue. Rare enough to make them sought after, yet common enough not to be frustrating to acquire.
1x cards or pass tokens are neither unique nor particularly interesting. Consumables in general tend to be junk in STO.
I'd go with gear, clothes, etc.
If it were gear/clothes or whatever you can own for the lifetime of your character, then it might also be good to make drops character bound on equip. That should encourage replays because of the chance to trade them.
I think any unique rewards need to be something that is fancy enough to get people's attention (like the old drops) but also something that people want to keep coming back for.
The issues with just gear of costumes is that there is a finite number and sooner or later all of them are owned by all players, so the incentive is gone, at least for the veterans.
So you need something that entices people like your 4+ year vets, but also can be acquired repeatedly to keep us coming back.
Some sort of limited use item perhaps? Or extremely powerful consumables? Maybe discount tokens for the C-store or lobi store? Or even just actual lobi themselves?
Anything to get people playing content again AND...keep coming back for more across all the content.
Compare that to when the sets were rare drops and everyone wanted to get them just to have them.
Yeah I think this should come back at some point. Preferably a consumable of sorts. It can be unique 1x Admiralty cards or token passes for example. Something useful enough that people would want them for various reasons that is uniquely rewarded for each queue. Rare enough to make them sought after, yet common enough not to be frustrating to acquire.
1x cards or pass tokens are neither unique nor particularly interesting. Consumables in general tend to be junk in STO.
I'd go with gear, clothes, etc.
If it were gear/clothes or whatever you can own for the lifetime of your character, then it might also be good to make drops character bound on equip. That should encourage replays because of the chance to trade them.
I think any unique rewards need to be something that is fancy enough to get people's attention (like the old drops) but also something that people want to keep coming back for.
The issues with just gear of costumes is that there is a finite number and sooner or later all of them are owned by all players, so the incentive is gone, at least for the veterans.
So you need something that entices people like your 4+ year vets, but also can be acquired repeatedly to keep us coming back.
Some sort of limited use item perhaps? Or extremely powerful consumables? Maybe discount tokens for the C-store or lobi store? Or even just actual lobi themselves?
Anything to get people playing content again AND...keep coming back for more across all the content.
If at any point a drop is "owned by all players," then it's obviously not rare enough. Making them tradeable solves the problem of each player only needing one. That is, if it's even an item that player only needs one.
Then there's the good old strategy of requiring duplicates for upgrading, etc. Or if there really starts being too many in the game and interest falls, they can just put up a special store or something that lets you trade 5 of them for something even better. And of course nothing's stopping them from adding/replacing drops down the line if they want.
Adding RNG to interesting drops, like in Dark Souls or Borderlands, would definitely make me do certain queues.
I can't tell you how many times I've killed the Mad Warrior in Belfry Sol to get his entire set or Savage Lee for an upgraded Unkempt Harold...
Frankly, if they had a ground weapon like the Unkempt Harold (in terms of fire power and animation), I'd run that queue until my fingers bled to get it.
Want to make queues that are more or less dead spring back to life?
Its simple - just adjust the missions
Like take assault on terok nor - If they want to bring that back to life:
1) Adjust the enemies threat rating so allies can aggro mobs to stop them firing at technicians (currently even if you use the deciever, terran mobs in that area ignore it)
2) alter the passcode corridoor so theres two combat levels - the upper floor containing the grenadiers and turrets, the bottom level containing switches and the code terminals - that way its not just an endless barrage of grenade death (or kill the puzzle completely and just make it a 'survive x waves' area whilst protecting a few techs - not a timegate)
3)have a group of brave macos who activate the plates automatically (provided you defend them, if they die its manual activation), the players task to lure her onto the plates - her ai adjusted so her aggro goes automatically to the one nearest to the orb chamber allowing an easier lure
4)increased mark rewards with option rewards that reward well up to the point full optionals can provide more marks than the base - currently optionals are ignored as they only offer 5 or so more marks
There, you've turned one of the most annoying dead modes into a highly (for ground) playable mode
On the opposite side, adding elements to lengthen playtime of short duration missions could be used - if they offered more than you'd lose
For example cca- maybe have the ce invincible at first until named dreads are destroyed (each with a different resistance, for example each weak indidually to exotic, torpedo, dot, energy and so on then the ce consumes the dreads creating mini ces - each one killed lowing the ces resists overall - set it as a different ce with valuable optionals that reward time spent (dare I say it...a small chance of generic xii/xiv equipment with optionals rewarding more gear?)
This would reward newbies with better gear and vets with more loot ec as well as marks, negating the lengthening issues
I think if they spent time overhauling current content, be it structural changes or 'idiotproofing' it would go a long way towards reviving missionplay; especially by removing elements that are structurally more timegates than mission critical elements
Humans tend to follow the path of least resistance so make playing and optional completion the path of least resistance for those not filled with TRIBBLE ships and doffs
Having thought about it, asking for Admiralty to be nerfed/rebalanced/changed/retooled ect with Cryptic's history of "cough" ! "cough" ! doing those afore mentioned things, we might as well change the title of the thread to Cryptic please remove Admiralty from the game.
I still agreed however the queues need some form of resuscitation to breath life back into them.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
STO has quite a few problems in this area, but, two main points:
1:
Queues were always unhealthy for the game. An MMO experience is entering the field, discovering other players, and having open leave to exit the area or enter on your own accord, not accounting for specialized things like a raid/dungeon. The only thing in the game that reflects that mentality is something like a Battlezone. Queues are antithetical to this. The actual map of STO is a fairly lifeless, barren wasteland of non-content. Queues are static, instanced content with random groups. They're somewhat comparable to a dungeon, except they don't have particularly creative content within them, there is no fail state, groups are randomized and the time to complete them ranges from 30 seconds to an hour, yet their rewards stay the same. They're very poorly designed.
2.
Doff and Admirality are probably the two worst systems in the game. They exist mainly to push people into the C-store to enlarge character roster limits, and that's it. But as actual content, there is no content. It's a menu with buttons you click on to receive resources. It's a transparently lazy, offensively designed system to gate players and corral them into the zen shop. The only reason why players tolerate it is because it is literally a reward button menu, and requires no effort - just wasted time. While it's fine for a company to want to make money, both of these systems are shamefully designed and smack of a lack of care or desire to improve a product.
Both systems, in a better game, would not exist. Queues would instead be open world content similar to Ker'rat or the Battlezones, with combined Ground/Space queues with longer time frames being more typical dungeons. Larger scale multi-fleet raids, etc. The Doff and Admirality system can be very, very easily replaced, as their only foundation is the encouragement to expand rosters. Having an instanced player "home" map with your personal fleet in it, in open combat (randomizing ships upon entry) would alleviate a lot of that. You would collect resources the same way you refine dilithium. Once per day, log in and receive the resources your ships have accrued. Duty Officers are a bit more complicated, since they replaced the only Exploration system STO ever had, which itself is a huge, gaping hole in the entire design philosophy of the game.
When people complain about queues being empty, they're not complaining about wanting to run queues. They're complaining about needing to run them to get resources, and not being able to get those resources because the queue is dead.
You don't solve that by ruining other content. You address the fact that people aren't committing to content because they don't want to. This is a video game. Players exchange money to be entertained. If your systems are boring, that is your fault as a developer. You don't "fix" that by creating systems like Doffing or Admirality. You do your job and improve your content. A lesson STO's developers have never learned, because they're too busy pushing out monetized micro-transactions; they simply have no pride in the overall product, or at least not enough influence internally to realize it.
Yeah in the couple hours I might have to play, my choice is doff/admiralty on my 8 toons for max rewards or have 'fun' pew-pewing and make next to nothing. I usually take the rewards and maybe do a little pew pew before logging off.
Previously we could rely on good old contraband to get us our daily dilithium, but when that road was closed we were forced into queues which became ever more stale due to the DPS increase.
Now with the admiralty at least we can get sufficient dilithium for our daily needs and spend the rest of the time on content which we actually enjoy..
<translation> hands of the admiralty. ,</translation>
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
Admiralty is currently over-rewarding. I am currently earning more than my daily Dilithium refinement cap just by doing Admiralty alone. I am proposing the following:
Either keep Tour of Duty 10 Dilithium rewards for Klingon and Ferengi missions the same but remove all Dil rewards from the normal Admiralty missions OR halve the Tour of Duty 10 Dilithium rewards (down to 15k) and keep the Dil rewards from the normal missions.
Remove Dilithium rewards from all other sources other than first time mission play-throughs (including Patrols), Mines, Battlezones and STFs.
Increase mark rewards from Battlezones but reduce Dilithium rewards
Award Dilithium in STFs only on first play-through for the day for that specific mark (reward them with daily bonus reward boxes). This should encourage playing multiple queue types (and not just farming ISA/Borg STFs or CCA for example)
Remove choice-mark boxes from Red Alerts except for when Red Alert events are running (this would prevent simply farming Red Alerts for Dil)
Add small Dilithium rewards for PvP kills and/or reward winning teams.
Someone suggested this in Discord, would be nice if STFs also rewarded other things like random 1x use Admiralty card drops or Pass Tokens to help newer players with few ships in their roster.
I know this will probably be unpopular, but I feel that we are being spoiled by all the Dil sources that rewards us while essentially doing nothing. We did fine before Admiralty. IMO Admiralty should be an effective means to supplement our Dilithium income, and not the main source.
Even with the above changes, the Dilithium rewards from Admiralty won't be useless. If the Dilithium rewards of the Tour of Duty completion is maintained, you'll only need to earn 2k Dilithium from other sources per day, or about 3 Advanced STFs or 2 Elite STFs. If those Dilithium rewards are halved, you still have the normal Admiralty missions (which reward up to several thousand by themselves).
There really needs to be a push towards the multiplayer aspect of the game (this is an MMO after all). Rewards should be skewed in favor of multi-player activity.
I agree with you here e30ernest. Sadly, there are far too many ways to easy get get rewards with very little effect. Of course, if changes were to be made, or even attempted, Cryptic would have to have a very fun balance to how they might do it.
Sadly, I feel that even if Cryptic did changes a few things to attempt to re-balance the game, and get the queues running more. Alot of the playerbase would chuck a tantrum of epic scale.
I think yourself, you have seen some of the epic rage fests that occurs, when people believe they will need to spend an extra 5 minutes doing something. Or when something is changed to fix an exploit or unintended consequence of queue changes that over rewards or finishes before it is suppose to.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,588Community Moderator
The only odd thing I find with the Admiralty is having the Ferengi ToD 10 give the same reward as the Klingon one.
If the goal was ONLY dilithium... why run Fed or Romulan Admiralty at all? Fed offers 2 Spec points for ToD, and Romulan gives tech upgrade items. Also... we're capped out at 8k a day. So honestly relying on queues alone for Dilithium is slow and reliant on you focusing everything on that alone. Admiralty allows you to have some passive stuff going at the same time you're playing the game.
As people have mentioned, one of the main issues with the queues is NOT the Dilithium, but the mark payout vs effort. The reason Infected is so popular, and always has been, is because its simple, and for some reason people use it as the DPS Measuring Stick. Queues like Azure Nebula Rescue actually cap out after a certain point, so it doesn't matter how many points you earn, you'll cap out before you finish so putting in effort to get as many points as possible is a waste of time. You're getting... something around 24 marks for an Azure run. That's it. And then there's queues like Undine Infiltration, which are pretty easy to Troll and isn't all pew pew, and the Competitive PvE, which some people find as "forced PvP" or can be easily Trolled.
It is a number of factors, some of which existed BEFORE Admiralty was introduced.
In summary... the main issues are:
DPS
Reward vs Effort
Trolling ability
General Interest in content
All of which existed before Admiralty was introduced.
As for the Choice boxes... they allow for players to be able to get what they need. However if they want more, they still have to go to the respective areas that award those marks. Yea a single Borg Red Alert can net you almost 60 or so of a given Mark with the daily bonus, but its not an efficient way to farm marks of any one type as after that daily bonus... that's only about 10 marks a run every 30 minutes. And for a project that requires 500 marks and 3 Elite marks only available by either trading 100 marks for 1 elite or running an Advanced Queue...
We need better game mechanics than Health freaking sponges. Is probably the main reason why all the queues are dead, expect for a few.
All the mobs are too health spongey even with all the power creep...
The Rising of the Delta is the best expansion ever, and people love it to death because it is a good day to die in the endless struggle for supremacy of your own conviction. (A spin off of the Delta Rising is the best expansion ever and all the players love it.)
And for a project that requires 500 marks and 3 Elite marks only available by either trading 100 marks for 1 elite or running an Advanced Queue...
Elite marks need to go. They just force players to do Advanced/Elite queues when they may not be ready just because 1 elite mark is worth 100 normal. And if you only get 20 marks on a normal run, who's going to bother running 5 normal queues when they can get more in 1 Advanced run?
Reputation Marks/Elite Marks are now worse than the Badges of Exploration that got removed back in Season 4(?) because they were getting out of hand. They need to just have 1 type of Mark that covers all reputations. Then people wouldn't be complaining about dead queues that they need for older marks they want to get. Cryptic can make the new queues they want players to run give MORE marks and players will go there. Sure players will stockpile marks and buy all the new gear on day 1, but now it's backwards: you stop doing the queues after you have the gear that helps you do the queues! How does that make sense? And after they use their marks for the new gear, they'll need new marks so they'll run the queues anyway.
Alternately, convert old queues into single player missions. Then not being able to find 4 more players won't be a problem. (And it'd be cool if your boffs could command 4 of your other ships as a space 'away team' so its a simulated queue that has 5 ships running it. But I'd guess that's way beyond Cryptic's abilities.)
Sometimes I think I play STO just to have something to complain about on the forums.
The only thing I agree on is we definitely need a Unified Reputation mark for all 10+ Reputations. I put 10+ since I know there's going to be another reputation after Competitive. Because trying to keep track of all these reputations are a pain...
The Rising of the Delta is the best expansion ever, and people love it to death because it is a good day to die in the endless struggle for supremacy of your own conviction. (A spin off of the Delta Rising is the best expansion ever and all the players love it.)
Personally, I'd like to see some of the older reputations updated with some new rewards and a reworking of set powers to make them more desirable to everyone. Perhaps things like adding a warp core/singularity core to the older reputations whose sets don't have them, maybe some unique heavy weapons. For that matter, I'd like to see a return of the unique AP beams you used to be able to get from grinding Borg STFs. I know there was some sort of problem with the [Borg] modifier back years ago, but surely under this new system they could find a way to make that work again.
Giving everyone new shineys to work for would almost certainly get the public ques filling up again.
Admiralty is currently over-rewarding. I am currently earning more than my daily Dilithium refinement cap just by doing Admiralty alone. I am proposing the following:
Either keep Tour of Duty 10 Dilithium rewards for Klingon and Ferengi missions the same but remove all Dil rewards from the normal Admiralty missions OR halve the Tour of Duty 10 Dilithium rewards (down to 15k) and keep the Dil rewards from the normal missions.
Remove Dilithium rewards from all other sources other than first time mission play-throughs (including Patrols), Mines, Battlezones and STFs.
Increase mark rewards from Battlezones but reduce Dilithium rewards
Award Dilithium in STFs only on first play-through for the day for that specific mark (reward them with daily bonus reward boxes). This should encourage playing multiple queue types (and not just farming ISA/Borg STFs or CCA for example)
Remove choice-mark boxes from Red Alerts except for when Red Alert events are running (this would prevent simply farming Red Alerts for Dil)
Add small Dilithium rewards for PvP kills and/or reward winning teams.
Someone suggested this in Discord, would be nice if STFs also rewarded other things like random 1x use Admiralty card drops or Pass Tokens to help newer players with few ships in their roster.
I know this will probably be unpopular, but I feel that we are being spoiled by all the Dil sources that rewards us while essentially doing nothing. We did fine before Admiralty. IMO Admiralty should be an effective means to supplement our Dilithium income, and not the main source.
Even with the above changes, the Dilithium rewards from Admiralty won't be useless. If the Dilithium rewards of the Tour of Duty completion is maintained, you'll only need to earn 2k Dilithium from other sources per day, or about 3 Advanced STFs or 2 Elite STFs. If those Dilithium rewards are halved, you still have the normal Admiralty missions (which reward up to several thousand by themselves).
There really needs to be a push towards the multiplayer aspect of the game (this is an MMO after all). Rewards should be skewed in favor of multi-player activity.
I would love to see unique rewards added to the stf ques that are linked to both the que, as well as to the difficulty of the stf you are doing, which would even if for a short time give a appeal to play the ques outside of the standard rewards you get. If these rewards were updated over time with new drops to keep the appeal updated an things for people to want to do the stf for would be nice. I would stll though also like to see the static reward system that is used for stfs changed into something more tiered, and dynamic so that length an complexity of the stfs can actually create a draw for players to do more of the content without feeling short changed by getting the same rewards as they would for doing a much easier an simpler stf.
Though I would also say that giving either rep-based quests/missions that might have you needing to finish specific stfs, or groups of stfs that might be something like the endevor system kinda. Add in new rep-projects that you need both the standard materials for the rep projects, but these might have materials that drop from specific stfs as well.
I would personally prefer to see elite marks removed from finishing stfs, and being something gained from finishing optionals in both normal an advanced modes of the stf, with the number of elite marks given based on difficulty an also how many opitionals are finished. This would push people to attempt the optionals, as well as give the optional objective a tangible value, while also give players seeking elite marks a the ability to gain them via normal by finishing the opitionals in the stfs (I am thinking make it that completing the optionals in normal gets you one elite mark, while finishing the optionals in advanced might get you 2-3 based on the number of optional objectives.).
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,588Community Moderator
The only thing I agree on is we definitely need a Unified Reputation mark for all 10+ Reputations. I put 10+ since I know there's going to be another reputation after Competitive. Because trying to keep track of all these reputations are a pain...
That would kill them even more. Because guess which one would get spammed even more than it is now?
Infected.
Why bother running anything else if we can faceroll Infected for EVERYTHING?
To be perfectly fair, I remember queues being dead long before Admiralty became a thing.
Very true.
My biggest problem with this proposal is that at it's core.. it's designed to force everyone to play a certain way. Not everyone wants to run Queues and it's not the only thing to do in this game. Personally, I like running them but I don't do it every day nor would I want to.
This proposal restricts freedom and forces people into one narrow system for obtaining rewards, a change that by nature I will always oppose. Parity is brought about by an abundance of attractive options, not by a pure lack of good options. If we want to fix queues, lets fix queues, not attack every alternative.
It's quite simple, as long as there is ONE reward (dilithium) for everything, players will do the math and only the most rewarding source(s) will be played.
The only way to have all content be reasonably popular is to have different rewards for different things.
Admiralty is currently over-rewarding. I am currently earning more than my daily Dilithium refinement cap just by doing Admiralty alone. I am proposing the following:
Either keep Tour of Duty 10 Dilithium rewards for Klingon and Ferengi missions the same but remove all Dil rewards from the normal Admiralty missions OR halve the Tour of Duty 10 Dilithium rewards (down to 15k) and keep the Dil rewards from the normal missions.
Remove Dilithium rewards from all other sources other than first time mission play-throughs (including Patrols), Mines, Battlezones and STFs.
Increase mark rewards from Battlezones but reduce Dilithium rewards
Award Dilithium in STFs only on first play-through for the day for that specific mark (reward them with daily bonus reward boxes). This should encourage playing multiple queue types (and not just farming ISA/Borg STFs or CCA for example)
Remove choice-mark boxes from Red Alerts except for when Red Alert events are running (this would prevent simply farming Red Alerts for Dil)
Add small Dilithium rewards for PvP kills and/or reward winning teams.
Someone suggested this in Discord, would be nice if STFs also rewarded other things like random 1x use Admiralty card drops or Pass Tokens to help newer players with few ships in their roster.
I know this will probably be unpopular, but I feel that we are being spoiled by all the Dil sources that rewards us while essentially doing nothing. We did fine before Admiralty. IMO Admiralty should be an effective means to supplement our Dilithium income, and not the main source.
Even with the above changes, the Dilithium rewards from Admiralty won't be useless. If the Dilithium rewards of the Tour of Duty completion is maintained, you'll only need to earn 2k Dilithium from other sources per day, or about 3 Advanced STFs or 2 Elite STFs. If those Dilithium rewards are halved, you still have the normal Admiralty missions (which reward up to several thousand by themselves).
There really needs to be a push towards the multiplayer aspect of the game (this is an MMO after all). Rewards should be skewed in favor of multi-player activity.
I really don't see dilitihium stopping people from doing stfs or it's just me that I don't do stfs for dil. I agree with removing choice marks from from borg/tholian RAs.
JJ Connie > TOS Connie
Lag denied your Heal
What happened to my Halon consoles
Poni?
Admiralty is fine the way it is. The last time I played multiple stfs was b4 the rep system was Introduced. I miss the random reward after the stfs completes
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,588Community Moderator
Admiralty is fine the way it is. The last time I played multiple stfs was b4 the rep system was Introduced. I miss the random reward after the stfs completes
I don't. Drove me insane trying to get the tech drops. Someone could run it 15 times and get 15 in a row... while the next person has probably run it 50 times... with 0 drops!
I know! I WAS that next person for the longest time!
. I miss the random reward after the stfs completes
You must have actually gotten the drops then. I didn't. People would say they have all their alts with MACO/Borg/Honor Guard gear and my main toon was still at 2/3 of one set. I prefer the tried-and-true incremental marks grind to get stuff. At least then effort = rewards. Not RNG = rewards. We got more than enough of that with lockboxes.
Sometimes I think I play STO just to have something to complain about on the forums.
2 words, hell no....How about you just dont do them OP, the game is already jacked up enough. I find the Admiralty rewarding and now days for me in this game, there are not many left with all the freaking Nerfing that's taken place thanks to people complaining like you. Sometimes I think you people really work for Perfect World/Cryptic Studios.
Then there is the other extreme. After you max out all Specializations, the Federation Admiralty 10 of 10 does not award two Spec Points but the normal reward for two Levels after max, 5,760 Dilitium. No correspondence there.
With another Fleet Holding coming, I wouldn't be too quick to jump onto the anti-Dilithium bandwagon.
Cryptic seems to be having a 'blast' constantly running R&D Promos and Phoenix Prize Pack Events to suck Dilitium out after flooding the Market in the first place.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
STO has quite a few problems in this area, but, two main points:
1:
Queues were always unhealthy for the game. An MMO experience is entering the field, discovering other players, and having open leave to exit the area or enter on your own accord, not accounting for specialized things like a raid/dungeon. The only thing in the game that reflects that mentality is something like a Battlezone. Queues are antithetical to this. The actual map of STO is a fairly lifeless, barren wasteland of non-content. Queues are static, instanced content with random groups. They're somewhat comparable to a dungeon, except they don't have particularly creative content within them, there is no fail state, groups are randomized and the time to complete them ranges from 30 seconds to an hour, yet their rewards stay the same. They're very poorly designed.
2.
Doff and Admirality are probably the two worst systems in the game. They exist mainly to push people into the C-store to enlarge character roster limits, and that's it. But as actual content, there is no content. It's a menu with buttons you click on to receive resources. It's a transparently lazy, offensively designed system to gate players and corral them into the zen shop. The only reason why players tolerate it is because it is literally a reward button menu, and requires no effort - just wasted time. While it's fine for a company to want to make money, both of these systems are shamefully designed and smack of a lack of care or desire to improve a product.
Both systems, in a better game, would not exist. Queues would instead be open world content similar to Ker'rat or the Battlezones, with combined Ground/Space queues with longer time frames being more typical dungeons. Larger scale multi-fleet raids, etc. The Doff and Admirality system can be very, very easily replaced, as their only foundation is the encouragement to expand rosters. Having an instanced player "home" map with your personal fleet in it, in open combat (randomizing ships upon entry) would alleviate a lot of that. You would collect resources the same way you refine dilithium. Once per day, log in and receive the resources your ships have accrued. Duty Officers are a bit more complicated, since they replaced the only Exploration system STO ever had, which itself is a huge, gaping hole in the entire design philosophy of the game.
When people complain about queues being empty, they're not complaining about wanting to run queues. They're complaining about needing to run them to get resources, and not being able to get those resources because the queue is dead.
You don't solve that by ruining other content. You address the fact that people aren't committing to content because they don't want to. This is a video game. Players exchange money to be entertained. If your systems are boring, that is your fault as a developer. You don't "fix" that by creating systems like Doffing or Admirality. You do your job and improve your content. A lesson STO's developers have never learned, because they're too busy pushing out monetized micro-transactions; they simply have no pride in the overall product, or at least not enough influence internally to realize it.
I feel the exact opposite... all I do is play DOFFing and Admiralty .... because I think the "video game" stuff with ships and ground is just clicking and pointing.
"Spend your life doing strange things with weird people." -- UNK
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
The New Romulus Ground Zone has a nice balance of Mark payout and Dilitium rewards.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Comments
If it were gear/clothes or whatever you can own for the lifetime of your character, then it might also be good to make drops character bound on equip. That should encourage replays because of the chance to trade them.
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I think any unique rewards need to be something that is fancy enough to get people's attention (like the old drops) but also something that people want to keep coming back for.
The issues with just gear of costumes is that there is a finite number and sooner or later all of them are owned by all players, so the incentive is gone, at least for the veterans.
So you need something that entices people like your 4+ year vets, but also can be acquired repeatedly to keep us coming back.
Some sort of limited use item perhaps? Or extremely powerful consumables? Maybe discount tokens for the C-store or lobi store? Or even just actual lobi themselves?
Anything to get people playing content again AND...keep coming back for more across all the content.
Then there's the good old strategy of requiring duplicates for upgrading, etc. Or if there really starts being too many in the game and interest falls, they can just put up a special store or something that lets you trade 5 of them for something even better. And of course nothing's stopping them from adding/replacing drops down the line if they want.
There can always be more.
I can't tell you how many times I've killed the Mad Warrior in Belfry Sol to get his entire set or Savage Lee for an upgraded Unkempt Harold...
Frankly, if they had a ground weapon like the Unkempt Harold (in terms of fire power and animation), I'd run that queue until my fingers bled to get it.
Its simple - just adjust the missions
Like take assault on terok nor - If they want to bring that back to life:
1) Adjust the enemies threat rating so allies can aggro mobs to stop them firing at technicians (currently even if you use the deciever, terran mobs in that area ignore it)
2) alter the passcode corridoor so theres two combat levels - the upper floor containing the grenadiers and turrets, the bottom level containing switches and the code terminals - that way its not just an endless barrage of grenade death (or kill the puzzle completely and just make it a 'survive x waves' area whilst protecting a few techs - not a timegate)
3)have a group of brave macos who activate the plates automatically (provided you defend them, if they die its manual activation), the players task to lure her onto the plates - her ai adjusted so her aggro goes automatically to the one nearest to the orb chamber allowing an easier lure
4)increased mark rewards with option rewards that reward well up to the point full optionals can provide more marks than the base - currently optionals are ignored as they only offer 5 or so more marks
There, you've turned one of the most annoying dead modes into a highly (for ground) playable mode
On the opposite side, adding elements to lengthen playtime of short duration missions could be used - if they offered more than you'd lose
For example cca- maybe have the ce invincible at first until named dreads are destroyed (each with a different resistance, for example each weak indidually to exotic, torpedo, dot, energy and so on then the ce consumes the dreads creating mini ces - each one killed lowing the ces resists overall - set it as a different ce with valuable optionals that reward time spent (dare I say it...a small chance of generic xii/xiv equipment with optionals rewarding more gear?)
This would reward newbies with better gear and vets with more loot ec as well as marks, negating the lengthening issues
I think if they spent time overhauling current content, be it structural changes or 'idiotproofing' it would go a long way towards reviving missionplay; especially by removing elements that are structurally more timegates than mission critical elements
Humans tend to follow the path of least resistance so make playing and optional completion the path of least resistance for those not filled with TRIBBLE ships and doffs
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I still agreed however the queues need some form of resuscitation to breath life back into them.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
1:
Queues were always unhealthy for the game. An MMO experience is entering the field, discovering other players, and having open leave to exit the area or enter on your own accord, not accounting for specialized things like a raid/dungeon. The only thing in the game that reflects that mentality is something like a Battlezone. Queues are antithetical to this. The actual map of STO is a fairly lifeless, barren wasteland of non-content. Queues are static, instanced content with random groups. They're somewhat comparable to a dungeon, except they don't have particularly creative content within them, there is no fail state, groups are randomized and the time to complete them ranges from 30 seconds to an hour, yet their rewards stay the same. They're very poorly designed.
2.
Doff and Admirality are probably the two worst systems in the game. They exist mainly to push people into the C-store to enlarge character roster limits, and that's it. But as actual content, there is no content. It's a menu with buttons you click on to receive resources. It's a transparently lazy, offensively designed system to gate players and corral them into the zen shop. The only reason why players tolerate it is because it is literally a reward button menu, and requires no effort - just wasted time. While it's fine for a company to want to make money, both of these systems are shamefully designed and smack of a lack of care or desire to improve a product.
Both systems, in a better game, would not exist. Queues would instead be open world content similar to Ker'rat or the Battlezones, with combined Ground/Space queues with longer time frames being more typical dungeons. Larger scale multi-fleet raids, etc. The Doff and Admirality system can be very, very easily replaced, as their only foundation is the encouragement to expand rosters. Having an instanced player "home" map with your personal fleet in it, in open combat (randomizing ships upon entry) would alleviate a lot of that. You would collect resources the same way you refine dilithium. Once per day, log in and receive the resources your ships have accrued. Duty Officers are a bit more complicated, since they replaced the only Exploration system STO ever had, which itself is a huge, gaping hole in the entire design philosophy of the game.
When people complain about queues being empty, they're not complaining about wanting to run queues. They're complaining about needing to run them to get resources, and not being able to get those resources because the queue is dead.
You don't solve that by ruining other content. You address the fact that people aren't committing to content because they don't want to. This is a video game. Players exchange money to be entertained. If your systems are boring, that is your fault as a developer. You don't "fix" that by creating systems like Doffing or Admirality. You do your job and improve your content. A lesson STO's developers have never learned, because they're too busy pushing out monetized micro-transactions; they simply have no pride in the overall product, or at least not enough influence internally to realize it.
Previously we could rely on good old contraband to get us our daily dilithium, but when that road was closed we were forced into queues which became ever more stale due to the DPS increase.
Now with the admiralty at least we can get sufficient dilithium for our daily needs and spend the rest of the time on content which we actually enjoy..
<translation> hands of the admiralty. ,</translation>
I agree with you here e30ernest. Sadly, there are far too many ways to easy get get rewards with very little effect. Of course, if changes were to be made, or even attempted, Cryptic would have to have a very fun balance to how they might do it.
Sadly, I feel that even if Cryptic did changes a few things to attempt to re-balance the game, and get the queues running more. Alot of the playerbase would chuck a tantrum of epic scale.
I think yourself, you have seen some of the epic rage fests that occurs, when people believe they will need to spend an extra 5 minutes doing something. Or when something is changed to fix an exploit or unintended consequence of queue changes that over rewards or finishes before it is suppose to.
If the goal was ONLY dilithium... why run Fed or Romulan Admiralty at all? Fed offers 2 Spec points for ToD, and Romulan gives tech upgrade items. Also... we're capped out at 8k a day. So honestly relying on queues alone for Dilithium is slow and reliant on you focusing everything on that alone. Admiralty allows you to have some passive stuff going at the same time you're playing the game.
As people have mentioned, one of the main issues with the queues is NOT the Dilithium, but the mark payout vs effort. The reason Infected is so popular, and always has been, is because its simple, and for some reason people use it as the DPS Measuring Stick. Queues like Azure Nebula Rescue actually cap out after a certain point, so it doesn't matter how many points you earn, you'll cap out before you finish so putting in effort to get as many points as possible is a waste of time. You're getting... something around 24 marks for an Azure run. That's it. And then there's queues like Undine Infiltration, which are pretty easy to Troll and isn't all pew pew, and the Competitive PvE, which some people find as "forced PvP" or can be easily Trolled.
It is a number of factors, some of which existed BEFORE Admiralty was introduced.
In summary... the main issues are:
All of which existed before Admiralty was introduced.
As for the Choice boxes... they allow for players to be able to get what they need. However if they want more, they still have to go to the respective areas that award those marks. Yea a single Borg Red Alert can net you almost 60 or so of a given Mark with the daily bonus, but its not an efficient way to farm marks of any one type as after that daily bonus... that's only about 10 marks a run every 30 minutes. And for a project that requires 500 marks and 3 Elite marks only available by either trading 100 marks for 1 elite or running an Advanced Queue...
All the mobs are too health spongey even with all the power creep...
Elite marks need to go. They just force players to do Advanced/Elite queues when they may not be ready just because 1 elite mark is worth 100 normal. And if you only get 20 marks on a normal run, who's going to bother running 5 normal queues when they can get more in 1 Advanced run?
Reputation Marks/Elite Marks are now worse than the Badges of Exploration that got removed back in Season 4(?) because they were getting out of hand. They need to just have 1 type of Mark that covers all reputations. Then people wouldn't be complaining about dead queues that they need for older marks they want to get. Cryptic can make the new queues they want players to run give MORE marks and players will go there. Sure players will stockpile marks and buy all the new gear on day 1, but now it's backwards: you stop doing the queues after you have the gear that helps you do the queues! How does that make sense? And after they use their marks for the new gear, they'll need new marks so they'll run the queues anyway.
Alternately, convert old queues into single player missions. Then not being able to find 4 more players won't be a problem. (And it'd be cool if your boffs could command 4 of your other ships as a space 'away team' so its a simulated queue that has 5 ships running it. But I'd guess that's way beyond Cryptic's abilities.)
Giving everyone new shineys to work for would almost certainly get the public ques filling up again.
One word.... No
Though I would also say that giving either rep-based quests/missions that might have you needing to finish specific stfs, or groups of stfs that might be something like the endevor system kinda. Add in new rep-projects that you need both the standard materials for the rep projects, but these might have materials that drop from specific stfs as well.
I would personally prefer to see elite marks removed from finishing stfs, and being something gained from finishing optionals in both normal an advanced modes of the stf, with the number of elite marks given based on difficulty an also how many opitionals are finished. This would push people to attempt the optionals, as well as give the optional objective a tangible value, while also give players seeking elite marks a the ability to gain them via normal by finishing the opitionals in the stfs (I am thinking make it that completing the optionals in normal gets you one elite mark, while finishing the optionals in advanced might get you 2-3 based on the number of optional objectives.).
That would kill them even more. Because guess which one would get spammed even more than it is now?
Infected.
Why bother running anything else if we can faceroll Infected for EVERYTHING?
Very true.
My biggest problem with this proposal is that at it's core.. it's designed to force everyone to play a certain way. Not everyone wants to run Queues and it's not the only thing to do in this game. Personally, I like running them but I don't do it every day nor would I want to.
This proposal restricts freedom and forces people into one narrow system for obtaining rewards, a change that by nature I will always oppose. Parity is brought about by an abundance of attractive options, not by a pure lack of good options. If we want to fix queues, lets fix queues, not attack every alternative.
The only way to have all content be reasonably popular is to have different rewards for different things.
I really don't see dilitihium stopping people from doing stfs or it's just me that I don't do stfs for dil. I agree with removing choice marks from from borg/tholian RAs.
Lag denied your Heal
What happened to my Halon consoles
Poni?
I don't. Drove me insane trying to get the tech drops. Someone could run it 15 times and get 15 in a row... while the next person has probably run it 50 times... with 0 drops!
I know! I WAS that next person for the longest time!
You must have actually gotten the drops then. I didn't. People would say they have all their alts with MACO/Borg/Honor Guard gear and my main toon was still at 2/3 of one set. I prefer the tried-and-true incremental marks grind to get stuff. At least then effort = rewards. Not RNG = rewards. We got more than enough of that with lockboxes.
With another Fleet Holding coming, I wouldn't be too quick to jump onto the anti-Dilithium bandwagon.
Cryptic seems to be having a 'blast' constantly running R&D Promos and Phoenix Prize Pack Events to suck Dilitium out after flooding the Market in the first place.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
I feel the exact opposite... all I do is play DOFFing and Admiralty .... because I think the "video game" stuff with ships and ground is just clicking and pointing.
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'