Also i have not did PVP for some time and stoped due to unbalance. Imo what pvp needs now is a fresh start via special pvp sets, consoles and powers. But pvp players invested immense resorces in epic gear by now so i sugest trades. One can trade a normal set for a pvp set set of equal rarity, same with consoles if apply.
This with a few new pvp game type(ques) and maybe some kind or ranked fleet/armada pvp system can bring some new chalange in this area. Anyway pvp guys know what need to be done here better.
You do forget that the majority of the players is not those that have been playing for 5+ years. Most of them are new and NEED the admirality as a catch-up mechanic. Those players don't have 100+ admirality cards and can afford to get maybe 1k dil from it every day. And when they do manage to hit jackpot after like 2+ weeks, they are thrilled with the 30k dil. Also, most people play 1-3 characters tops. Not like 30+. For them the admirality is a SUPPLEMENT and not the main source.
If you fall into the other category then yes, 100+ ships and 30 chars at lvl52+ are a HUGE source of dil. But that is NOT the majority, thats the 5% of the playerbase.
If it is one thing we learnt from sticks and carrots is that if you beat the players with a stick (e.g nerf admirality) they will heavily resist your alternative and will find something else that they find rewarding. Worst case scenario the player simply leaves because he/she feels cheated out of the work/effort/money he has invested into a working system.
You want more STF's? Increase their rewards. More marks, dil. More EC. E.g make the first 3-5 STF's you do on that account grant extra dil refine tokens (+500/1000 refined dil on character where those are used). This way you don't get raw dil, you make it an account effort like endevour and it would only apply to 1 char instead of account. That would guarantee ppl would run those 3-5 extra queues every day. Then of course there would be a MINOR hit to dil market which needs to be taken into consideration. This dil refine token would HEAVILY favour casuals instead of hardcore gamers, as it being an account unlock would mean that 50 chars on an account would not give you an edge, while you could still refine a bit more dil -roughly 1 character's worth. Would this make you want to do more queues if you have 100+ ships and 30+ chars? Not really. And if you have like maybe 2-3 t6 ships and 2-3 chars? Definately.
It's not the lacking rewards that keep me from playing the queues. It's a dead fleet. Before DPS channels and stuff people would just ask in fleet chat, form a group and then do some STF's together. This way I did even the STF's I didn't really like that much.
Nowadays fleet chat is dead. Most people left with DR, some came back but then left again as the social part of the game was gone.
The admirality is actually the only thing that motivates me to log in every now and then. And once logged in I play some STF's. But only on advanced. At least this way I'm sure I'm not wasting my time with some clueless fedbears.
By nerfing admirality I would actually play less STF's, because I wouldn't log in in the first place.
STO is mostly a browsergame for me, with the occasional storyline mission once in a while. And even this content is worse than it once was. Repeating the same bloody mission to complete the set just sucks. Playing an arc and getting a set piece for every mission was much more enjoyable than this repetitive stuff we have now.
You are more than welcome to come join us... We need more people on the KDF side... Just sayin'... We have a great bunch players - most blue team but a great community overall and we are a new fleet....
If you are looking for an excellent PvE fleet consider: Omega Combat Division today.
Former member of the Cryptic Family & FriendsTesting Team. Sadly, one day, it simply vanished - without a word or trace...
If Admiralty gets nerfed, I think I'm done with STO. Keeping a small family Fleet going will become impossible- and that's really the only reason I log in.
Admiralty doesn't need to be nerfed just because you're lazy, OP.
If you knew exactly who you were responding to, you would not have made that comment.
e30ernest is a hard working individual and also a long standing contributer in reddit/sto, as well as in the reddit sto chat ingame. Several times this discussion has been brought up in that chat.
He honesty wants to re-build the queues, and make them more alive and involved at a glance. He is also right, Admirality rewards far too much for so little activity or requirement.
Of course, there is a balance way to go about it, and still keep admirality fresh and inviting. However, there are some hard choices to be made, and these choices also include us, as a powerbase, potentially taking a hit in several areas where we have had it far to easy for far too long.
"Oh, just buff the rewards of everything else to match admirality" Will not solve the problem, it will only make it worse.
We need to shift people away from the admirality, CCA, ISA, queues to give out multiple mark reward parks mentality. But still do it in a way to allow the general population to get what they need, with some time investment, and actually playing the game.
just get rid of all ques to begin with... who are we kidding? this is not a team game... solo game all the way and if you group up for these revised "ques".... have em scale based on team size.
as for too much dil in game... we have a cap per day... just lower the cap from per toon to per account... heck that would be better for metrics... instead of a farmer have X toons on 1 account... they would be forced to log in 10 or more accounts to help boost their numbers on paper.
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.
OP your whole premise is WRONG. The problem is NOT with admiralty but the queue system. To make it simple so that ANYONE can understand. Admiralty has been in effect since October 27, 2015 (season 11) while PvE queus have been going since July 7th, 2011 (Season 4). Ever since its creation PvE queues have been going through the same problems for the lack of activity.
Don't believe me...here's an old post complaining about dead queues long before there was admiralty:
PvE queues were BROKEN prior to Admiralty so do not blame Admiralty or use it as an incentive to change PVE queues.
Instead what worked in the past was to reward EXTRA juicy bonus PvE queus rotations. Every 3 or 4 days one used to get extra rewards for doing certain queues and they used to rotate among the many ones present. Or come up with a better idea to incentivize players.
Nerfing Admiralty is not a solution but you will only flame other players who are tired of grinding till your eyes bleed. Same as those who whined about former juicier Foundry rewards and PvP rewards no longer present in this game.
I honestly hate the admiralty system. Even with the rewards so high, I just can't get myself to sit there and use it. Paperwork just isn't enjoyable at all. However, if it were on a smartphone app, I would be into it especially when I'm not able to be at home online. .
I agree with bubblegirl2015 here. Asuming that players won't do q's only/mostly due to admirality rewards imo is the result of incomplete impression. Admirality did not generated q's problem and thus it will not fix it. And even if it would be 100% corect does anyone really thinks forcing the left active players into something they don't really wanna do is good solution ? Many invested zen in buying ships ONLY to supliment admirality ... what do we say to them ? bad luck ? take one for the team ? Cryptic allready did that with delta, s13, sci consoles and we see that result in q's.
Like i said in my above post, devs need to take measures to improve the q's overall experience, rewards and most important to find a way to integrate them into social-collective (fleet/armada). This will have a huge impact if done right imo. ALSO i sugest active rebalancing for some stf's and making the minimum team required 3 instead of 5.
As a fun fact i was thinking to get a pack of 3 sci ships to boost admirality but i don't wanna doit for now. Knowing how Cryptic fix things in this game i strongly suspect that a nerf to admirality will come but without any compensation or que improvement. The hammer is allways the fastest and simpler solution if you only care about yourself and don't have any pride in your work.
Then poor e30ernest will need to buy lots of new frige's to put all the bacon players generously donated to him . Yup most players will only remember that he asked for an admirality nerf not that he asked for a nerf and improvements .
e30ernest is a hard working individual and also a long standing contributer in reddit/sto, as well as in the reddit sto chat ingame.
Thank you for your kind words.
I'm happy with how this thread is going since there is a good exchange of ideas on going. Seems a lot of end-game suggestions have also cropped out here and Reddit too. It's a good thing players are now applying a bit more pressure on Cryptic to fix end-game content. Maybe they'll finally work on that.
Bring back the Weapon Signature Nullifiers/Amplifiers and restore them to their previous strength. At work so i can't explain right not, but it should be obvious anyway. Purging away the middle class of STO did a tremendous harm to queues, perhaps its time to revive it back to life by not having competitiveness and feeling of progression locked away behind a paywall.
As a soloist (I don't do group content of any kind) I see the game from a different perspective than most of you.
Originally if you wanted the "best" gear in game you had no choice but to run the STFs, no big surprise that I didn't have any of it.
When the reps started it was the same thing, if you wanted the Omega rep gear you needed BNPs which you could only get in the Borg STFs, even just getting the regular marks meant group content as the mark rewards on Defera have always been a joke.
The Nukara rep was no different as Nukara Prime gave the exact same rewards as Defera, thankfully that was changed a few years back.
The Dyson rep was the game changer, you no longer needed a que to get the regular and elite marks for a rep.
Since then only the Iconian and Competitive reps require you to play a que, Iconian for regular marks as the rewards on BodySnatcher Prime are as bad as Defera.
Then there's the AFKers many of you used to complain about, dil farmers, most running bots, they have found much easier and more abundant sources of dil to bot farm, so even they don't need the ques.
With the multi choice mark rewards from the RAs, and complaints about AFK penalties from DPS trolls, and other trolls deliberately trying to fail the run, is it any wonder fewer and fewer players want to PUG the STFs.
The answer to making queues more popular is to make them better and more rewarding. It isn't rocket science.
I heard that clearly.
Make the ques fun to play again and people will play them.
I don't play STO very much any more because of RL demands. Playing a thirty second STF where I had to wait thirty minutes for it to pop is not fun. Whenever I am on one of my alts which does not have all the Kewel Stuf I have on my main, I would prefer not to be teamed up with some DPS God when I pug. Whenever I am on my main, I would prefer not to be teamed up with someone who is clueless or simply trolling when I pug. And this is the part where someone will reflexively respond with the "Don't pug, then." remark. Easy enough for one to do so since it requires little effort and even fewer brain cells.
The admiralty system does not need to be nerfed to 'fix' the myriad of problems with the queues. To say something like this is ridiculous. Because the myriad of problems with the queues existed in this game long before the admiralty system was placed in it. I've played this game since February 2012. So it is possible I might know a thing or two about STO. I'll share it what I know next time and I promise it will be the best fifteen seconds of your day. I have played mostly daily but over the past few months I log in simply to see what's going on.
And do DOff Assignments.
And do Admiralty Assignments.
Why? Because these are the currently most fun ways for me to play STO. I cannot afford to spend twenty five hours a day in front of my laptop. There is no entertainment value at all in joining a queue where one ship does 100k+ DPS and the other three might hit 500 DPS between them.
I cannot afford to throw thousands of dollars at this game. I am never, ever going to have a completely Epic ship with all Epic gear and Epic BOffs and DOffs. So my going to either STOAcademy and STOBuilds is a pointless waste of time. Since no one who posts on either of those sites can be bothered to put together a build a regular working stiff could actually afford. Both time and money wise.
The Devs are also to blame here. Taking the path of least resistance has led to a over supply of Queues. "No, you're wrong, Thunder. Lemme explain. See that Queue over there uses Blue NPCs. This one right here uses Green NPCs. See the difference?"
Suggestions:
1) Drop the Normal Queues - No one plays them. You cannot really learn how to play the Advanced and Elite versions from them. So why are they taking up space which could be used more productively?
2) Drop the 2pc. Bonuses for Sets. Yup, you heard me right. The only way I would allow Set Bonuses would be if a ship or char had the entire set. This would encourage people to play more of the Queues more often. It would also help with balance amongst players. In fact, I would go so far as to impose penalties for mix-n-match. You don't put gasoline in a diesel engine car, do you? Nor do you put a 3/4 ton Warren winch on the front bumper of a Lambroghini.
3) Nerfing isn't the answer. Nor will it ever be the answer. You nerf something in this game, I stop playing it. I'm guessing I'm not the only one who thinks this way, either. So stop playing around with the rewards on the Queues.
4) Get rid of the damn Timegates! If I want to pug TRA on the same character twice in a row, I should be able to do that. You want me to play more Queues more often? Fine, let me play the ones I want to pay as often as I want to play them.
A six year old boy and his starship. Living the dream.
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.
OP your whole premise is WRONG. The problem is NOT with admiralty but the queue system. To make it simple so that ANYONE can understand. Admiralty has been in effect since October 27, 2015 (season 11) while PvE queus have been going since July 7th, 2011 (Season 4). Ever since its creation PvE queues have been going through the same problems for the lack of activity.
Don't believe me...here's an old post complaining about dead queues long before there was admiralty:
PvE queues were BROKEN prior to Admiralty so do not blame Admiralty or use it as an incentive to change PVE queues.
Instead what worked in the past was to reward EXTRA juicy bonus PvE queus rotations. Every 3 or 4 days one used to get extra rewards for doing certain queues and they used to rotate among the many ones present. Or come up with a better idea to incentivize players.
Nerfing Admiralty is not a solution but you will only flame other players who are tired of grinding till your eyes bleed. Same as those who whined about former juicier Foundry rewards and PvP rewards no longer present in this game.
Exactly.
It really started with Season 7 removing the STF random drops in favor of the rep system. Suddenly people didn't want to do the ground STFs anymore, because they required more strategy than ISE (and mind you, ISE still required some strategy back then).
Then there's the introduction and continued spread of choice marks, stuffing every event with all-choice marks, the near-total homogenization of non-mark queue rewards in Delta Rising, recruit events giving loads of account-unlock all-choice marks for every new toon, the queueification of the Red Alerts with the permanently available all-choice-marks for everyone, the introduction of the elite mark buying project...there's simply no reason to play any specific queue anymore.
Everytime they've made the rewards more generalized, more queues emptied out. It's got so bad the lukari queues were never busy even when the rep was new, because you could get everything from the Red Alerts.
The only queues Admiralty may be affecting a bit are ISA and CCA...the go-to dil grinders. Everything else has been emptied out by the queue reward structure already.
So I gotta ask OP... what in the world are you doing to max your dil cap with admiralty alone ?? What do you do, sit there and keep setting admiralty project after admiralty project ? As soon as you can ?
I too have a full time job and work for 10+ hours per day. So this is how I do my admiralty:
Morning before work while having breakfast (I wake up early anyway), slot in missions from Klingon arc. All VR missions I either slot a single shuttle or whatever expendable ship (unless it rewards 1k+ dil).
I run mostly 15-45min missions until I get ToD (which happens most of the time within the first 30mins).
Extra slots I start slotting in 1h+ missions from Ferengi arc with expendable ships unless they pay out 1k+ Dil.
At night, I collect Ferengi and Klingon missions I slotted earlier.
Repeat what I did with Klingon arc.
Usually within an hour I get Ferengi ToD as well.
If I don't get the ToD within the first hour I usually skip that for the next day. I get enough Dil from the minor missions anyway.
Edit: To give you an idea of how much Dil I earn just from the minor missions this way, I've earned up to 5k+ just from one morning round (collected at night). At a bad day, I'd earn 2-3k from each round. That's more than enough to earn more than I refine just from the 2 Admiralty missions.
Just to get back to you Ernest...
Okay, that's fair enough, you seem to make the most of the limited time you play. Seems that you use your Admiralty time very efficiently. And that's how you max out your refine cap with admiralty alone. *Sorry if I insinuated otherwise.
That said, I really doubt most people are using the system as efficiently as you are.
Like I said in my earlier post, if I bother to do admiralty at all, I just set it and forget it, collect the next day. It'll payout between 2000-3500 Dil on average with a lump sum of 30k every 10 - 12 days.
I don't think that's outrageous tbh, and helps people advance in game who may not otherwise have a lot of game time.
If someone can only play a few hours week (or less), admiralty rewards (or doffing/contraband for that matter) are an easy way to motivate them to continue logging in when time permits. Because of these systems, a casual with very little time can feel a sense of progression that cannot be achieved by running 1 or 2 queues a day in their limited playtime.
I just feel that correlating Admiralty use/rewards to dead queues is a mistake. And nerfing said rewards could be a detriment to more casual types of players.
But in reading your responses, I believe you understand it's a lot more complicated, and a multifaceted problem.
And as such this is a productive conversation.
I will conclude by saying that I'm on board with many people here in their suggestions to;
- Restore the old Queue UI. (I think the new one is universally hated)
- Re-implement the daily/hourly queue bonus rotation. (Or add a second bar to the Endeavor system that is Queue specific)
- Re-evaluate and normalize rewards across all queues.
They could sweeten the pot even further by awarding an account bound mark box for the first queued mission you play per day.
If that doesn't work.. I honestly don't think anything will.
Bring back the Weapon Signature Nullifiers/Amplifiers and restore them to their previous strength. At work so i can't explain right not, but it should be obvious anyway. Purging away the middle class of STO did a tremendous harm to queues, perhaps its time to revive it back to life by not having competitiveness and feeling of progression locked away behind a paywall.
This is actually a good point as well.
As much as the rep system has done to deflate queue population, the 'balance changes' have done just as much. Why? Because the 'average' player sits in that middle ground DPS wise and they were the hardest hit by the changes. The targets of the pass, those at the extreme high end simply made a few adaptations and life went on. For others though, low cost means of achieving effectiveness.. things like Plasma Consoles, Leech Console, Feedback Pulse trait from the free event ship, all that stuff hurt the 'average' player far more then the high end. Many of those players left when their builds were destroyed because they aren't 'space rich' and couldn't just go out and buy lobi/lockbox items and traits to replace the items they used to have easy access too.
Queues were struggling before they did the round of super nerfs. Between the nerfs and the HORRIBLE new Queue UI that absolutely no one wanted.. it's a miracle that queues ever see any activity at all.
But in reading your responses, I believe you understand it's a lot more complicated, and a multifaceted problem.
And as such this is a productive conversation.
I will conclude by saying that I'm on board with many people here in their suggestions to;
- Restore the old Queue UI. (I think the new one is universally hated)
- Re-implement the daily/hourly queue bonus rotation. (Or add a second bar to the Endeavor system that is Queue specific)
- Re-evaluate and normalize rewards across all queues.
They could sweeten the pot even further by awarding an account bound mark box for the first queued mission you play per day.
If that doesn't work.. I honestly don't think anything will.
Yes this is a multi-faceted problem. Things need to be done so that players both want and enjoy the multiplayer aspects of STO.
I doubt the new queue UI will ever be rolled back. That ship has gone and sailed. A good start would be to fix what we have now and make it better. A good start would be to remove the "Join Queue" button. Ticking the tick box next to an STF should queue you in.
Consumables are worthless. If you use them, you cease to have them. If you don't have them, and have to go back to doing without them, then what was the point of getting them in the first place?
1x cards or pass tokens are neither unique nor particularly interesting. Consumables in general tend to be junk in STO.
Good consumables have some value though. Before all those speed boosts came in, Alhena runs were a part of many player's daily routines.
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.
The admiralty system is just fine this game has been nerefed enough we don't need another nerf because you don't like the admiralty system. I am personally tired of all the grind grind grind
1) Drop the Normal Queues - No one plays them. You cannot really learn how to play the Advanced and Elite versions from them. So why are they taking up space which could be used more productively?
So... immediately toss rookie players into the meat grinder when they might not be hitting even 5k DPS? While it is true normal doesn't exactly prpare one for Advanced, there's still the gear factor to consider. Only time I would take an undergeared character in is if I already know what needs to be done. But even then I'd still try and make sure I can at least hold my own rather than hope my team can carry me.
2) Drop the 2pc. Bonuses for Sets. Yup, you heard me right. The only way I would allow Set Bonuses would be if a ship or char had the entire set. This would encourage people to play more of the Queues more often. It would also help with balance amongst players. In fact, I would go so far as to impose penalties for mix-n-match. You don't put gasoline in a diesel engine car, do you? Nor do you put a 3/4 ton Warren winch on the front bumper of a Lambroghini.
I have to disagree with this point. There are some sets that synergize well with others, but might not fit the ship you're flying very well for the full set. For example the Nukara weapons set. On my Tetryon build, I'm running full Nukara, full Krenim, and 2 piece Nukara weapon/console (specifically the mine and console) on a cruiser. Forcing someone to mount the Dual Beam Bank as well kinda messes with the synergy on slower turning ships such as cruisers. And then you have the special console sets that come off lockbox ships. You'd be FORCING people to sacrifice 3-4 console slots to get 1 bonus, and some people might not be able to AFFORD to get the other consoles. Especially Fed side for the Kelvin set as that would require a player to get not only the cross faction consoles, but BOTH Kelvin Connie AND Vengeance just to get ANY benefit AT ALL.Same applies to the 4 piece Xindi console set. OH! And lets not forget the Promo ships that can come with consoles that are part of a set as well! AND Anniversary ships like the Kobali Samsar, which has not only a console that is part of a set, but a WARP CORE for the KOBALI set, thus basically locking out everyone from getting ANY BONUSES FROM THE KOBALI SET WHATSOEVER.
3) Nerfing isn't the answer. Nor will it ever be the answer. You nerf something in this game, I stop playing it. I'm guessing I'm not the only one who thinks this way, either. So stop playing around with the rewards on the Queues.
In some cases a nerf is, but not all cases, I partially agree with you. If something is overperforming, balance it. If something is underperforming, balance it. If NPCs are HP Sponges, nerf 'em.
4) Get rid of the damn Timegates! If I want to pug TRA on the same character twice in a row, I should be able to do that. You want me to play more Queues more often? Fine, let me play the ones I want to pay as often as I want to play them.
Yea... in some cases, especially Mirror Invasion, the timegate is annoying when the team outperforms the queue. Although I think they fixed that particular problem by making the Terrans spawn all the time rather than stop after a certain number of portals.
I would say instead of dropping the normal ques instead look into a rework of how optional are treated, where instead of completing optional objectives giving you additional marks that it would now give you a reward of elite marks which would appeal to players to play the normal difficulty as many players do play the advanced for the elite mark and normal mark payout.
How I could see it working is that on normal difficulty you would get one to two elite marks for completing the optional objectives in the stf, while in advanced and elite you would get one or two elite marks respectively for completing those difficulties while also gaining additional elite marks for completing optional objectives (if the stfs get additional objectives in high difficulties it would relate to that difficulty's optional objective.). To me this would have been a better than the failure condition they attempted in delta rising.
Comments
This with a few new pvp game type(ques) and maybe some kind or ranked fleet/armada pvp system can bring some new chalange in this area. Anyway pvp guys know what need to be done here better.
If you fall into the other category then yes, 100+ ships and 30 chars at lvl52+ are a HUGE source of dil. But that is NOT the majority, thats the 5% of the playerbase.
You want more STF's? Increase their rewards. More marks, dil. More EC. E.g make the first 3-5 STF's you do on that account grant extra dil refine tokens (+500/1000 refined dil on character where those are used). This way you don't get raw dil, you make it an account effort like endevour and it would only apply to 1 char instead of account. That would guarantee ppl would run those 3-5 extra queues every day. Then of course there would be a MINOR hit to dil market which needs to be taken into consideration. This dil refine token would HEAVILY favour casuals instead of hardcore gamers, as it being an account unlock would mean that 50 chars on an account would not give you an edge, while you could still refine a bit more dil -roughly 1 character's worth. Would this make you want to do more queues if you have 100+ ships and 30+ chars? Not really. And if you have like maybe 2-3 t6 ships and 2-3 chars? Definately.
ingame: @.Spartan
Original Cryptic Forum Name: Spartan (member #124)
The Glorious, Kirk’s Protegè
If you knew exactly who you were responding to, you would not have made that comment.
e30ernest is a hard working individual and also a long standing contributer in reddit/sto, as well as in the reddit sto chat ingame. Several times this discussion has been brought up in that chat.
He honesty wants to re-build the queues, and make them more alive and involved at a glance. He is also right, Admirality rewards far too much for so little activity or requirement.
Of course, there is a balance way to go about it, and still keep admirality fresh and inviting. However, there are some hard choices to be made, and these choices also include us, as a powerbase, potentially taking a hit in several areas where we have had it far to easy for far too long.
"Oh, just buff the rewards of everything else to match admirality" Will not solve the problem, it will only make it worse.
We need to shift people away from the admirality, CCA, ISA, queues to give out multiple mark reward parks mentality. But still do it in a way to allow the general population to get what they need, with some time investment, and actually playing the game.
as for too much dil in game... we have a cap per day... just lower the cap from per toon to per account... heck that would be better for metrics... instead of a farmer have X toons on 1 account... they would be forced to log in 10 or more accounts to help boost their numbers on paper.
OP your whole premise is WRONG. The problem is NOT with admiralty but the queue system. To make it simple so that ANYONE can understand. Admiralty has been in effect since October 27, 2015 (season 11) while PvE queus have been going since July 7th, 2011 (Season 4). Ever since its creation PvE queues have been going through the same problems for the lack of activity.
Don't believe me...here's an old post complaining about dead queues long before there was admiralty:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/2jrvyc/with_the_current_pve_queue_rewards_being_nerfed/
https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/2n0smr/nobody_runs_space_stf_anymore/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/9900/discussions/0/619568708452128574/
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/11550905126
Sounds familiar....
PvE queues were BROKEN prior to Admiralty so do not blame Admiralty or use it as an incentive to change PVE queues.
Instead what worked in the past was to reward EXTRA juicy bonus PvE queus rotations. Every 3 or 4 days one used to get extra rewards for doing certain queues and they used to rotate among the many ones present. Or come up with a better idea to incentivize players.
Nerfing Admiralty is not a solution but you will only flame other players who are tired of grinding till your eyes bleed. Same as those who whined about former juicier Foundry rewards and PvP rewards no longer present in this game.
Original STO beta tester.
Many invested zen in buying ships ONLY to supliment admirality ... what do we say to them ? bad luck ? take one for the team ? Cryptic allready did that with delta, s13, sci consoles and we see that result in q's.
Like i said in my above post, devs need to take measures to improve the q's overall experience, rewards and most important to find a way to integrate them into social-collective (fleet/armada). This will have a huge impact if done right imo. ALSO i sugest active rebalancing for some stf's and making the minimum team required 3 instead of 5.
As a fun fact i was thinking to get a pack of 3 sci ships to boost admirality but i don't wanna doit for now. Knowing how Cryptic fix things in this game i strongly suspect that a nerf to admirality will come but without any compensation or que improvement.
The hammer is allways the fastest and simpler solution if you only care about yourself and don't have any pride in your work.
Then poor e30ernest will need to buy lots of new frige's to put all the bacon players generously donated to him
Thank you for your kind words.
I'm happy with how this thread is going since there is a good exchange of ideas on going. Seems a lot of end-game suggestions have also cropped out here and Reddit too. It's a good thing players are now applying a bit more pressure on Cryptic to fix end-game content. Maybe they'll finally work on that.
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How about we ostracize you? Everyone can say whatever the fk the way want as long as they don't break forum rules.
We have a interesting series of discussings here. Lets not get this thread locked down
Bring back the Weapon Signature Nullifiers/Amplifiers and restore them to their previous strength. At work so i can't explain right not, but it should be obvious anyway. Purging away the middle class of STO did a tremendous harm to queues, perhaps its time to revive it back to life by not having competitiveness and feeling of progression locked away behind a paywall.
I felt reducing the consoles was fair, but they over-did it IMO. A slight increase from their current status might do them good.
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Originally if you wanted the "best" gear in game you had no choice but to run the STFs, no big surprise that I didn't have any of it.
When the reps started it was the same thing, if you wanted the Omega rep gear you needed BNPs which you could only get in the Borg STFs, even just getting the regular marks meant group content as the mark rewards on Defera have always been a joke.
The Nukara rep was no different as Nukara Prime gave the exact same rewards as Defera, thankfully that was changed a few years back.
The Dyson rep was the game changer, you no longer needed a que to get the regular and elite marks for a rep.
Since then only the Iconian and Competitive reps require you to play a que, Iconian for regular marks as the rewards on BodySnatcher Prime are as bad as Defera.
Then there's the AFKers many of you used to complain about, dil farmers, most running bots, they have found much easier and more abundant sources of dil to bot farm, so even they don't need the ques.
With the multi choice mark rewards from the RAs, and complaints about AFK penalties from DPS trolls, and other trolls deliberately trying to fail the run, is it any wonder fewer and fewer players want to PUG the STFs.
I heard that clearly.
Make the ques fun to play again and people will play them.
I don't play STO very much any more because of RL demands. Playing a thirty second STF where I had to wait thirty minutes for it to pop is not fun. Whenever I am on one of my alts which does not have all the Kewel Stuf I have on my main, I would prefer not to be teamed up with some DPS God when I pug. Whenever I am on my main, I would prefer not to be teamed up with someone who is clueless or simply trolling when I pug. And this is the part where someone will reflexively respond with the "Don't pug, then." remark. Easy enough for one to do so since it requires little effort and even fewer brain cells.
The admiralty system does not need to be nerfed to 'fix' the myriad of problems with the queues. To say something like this is ridiculous. Because the myriad of problems with the queues existed in this game long before the admiralty system was placed in it. I've played this game since February 2012. So it is possible I might know a thing or two about STO. I'll share it what I know next time and I promise it will be the best fifteen seconds of your day. I have played mostly daily but over the past few months I log in simply to see what's going on.
And do DOff Assignments.
And do Admiralty Assignments.
Why? Because these are the currently most fun ways for me to play STO. I cannot afford to spend twenty five hours a day in front of my laptop. There is no entertainment value at all in joining a queue where one ship does 100k+ DPS and the other three might hit 500 DPS between them.
I cannot afford to throw thousands of dollars at this game. I am never, ever going to have a completely Epic ship with all Epic gear and Epic BOffs and DOffs. So my going to either STOAcademy and STOBuilds is a pointless waste of time. Since no one who posts on either of those sites can be bothered to put together a build a regular working stiff could actually afford. Both time and money wise.
The Devs are also to blame here. Taking the path of least resistance has led to a over supply of Queues. "No, you're wrong, Thunder. Lemme explain. See that Queue over there uses Blue NPCs. This one right here uses Green NPCs. See the difference?"
Suggestions:
1) Drop the Normal Queues - No one plays them. You cannot really learn how to play the Advanced and Elite versions from them. So why are they taking up space which could be used more productively?
2) Drop the 2pc. Bonuses for Sets. Yup, you heard me right. The only way I would allow Set Bonuses would be if a ship or char had the entire set. This would encourage people to play more of the Queues more often. It would also help with balance amongst players. In fact, I would go so far as to impose penalties for mix-n-match. You don't put gasoline in a diesel engine car, do you? Nor do you put a 3/4 ton Warren winch on the front bumper of a Lambroghini.
3) Nerfing isn't the answer. Nor will it ever be the answer. You nerf something in this game, I stop playing it. I'm guessing I'm not the only one who thinks this way, either. So stop playing around with the rewards on the Queues.
4) Get rid of the damn Timegates! If I want to pug TRA on the same character twice in a row, I should be able to do that. You want me to play more Queues more often? Fine, let me play the ones I want to pay as often as I want to play them.
It really started with Season 7 removing the STF random drops in favor of the rep system. Suddenly people didn't want to do the ground STFs anymore, because they required more strategy than ISE (and mind you, ISE still required some strategy back then).
Then there's the introduction and continued spread of choice marks, stuffing every event with all-choice marks, the near-total homogenization of non-mark queue rewards in Delta Rising, recruit events giving loads of account-unlock all-choice marks for every new toon, the queueification of the Red Alerts with the permanently available all-choice-marks for everyone, the introduction of the elite mark buying project...there's simply no reason to play any specific queue anymore.
Everytime they've made the rewards more generalized, more queues emptied out. It's got so bad the lukari queues were never busy even when the rep was new, because you could get everything from the Red Alerts.
The only queues Admiralty may be affecting a bit are ISA and CCA...the go-to dil grinders. Everything else has been emptied out by the queue reward structure already.
Just to get back to you Ernest...
Okay, that's fair enough, you seem to make the most of the limited time you play. Seems that you use your Admiralty time very efficiently. And that's how you max out your refine cap with admiralty alone. *Sorry if I insinuated otherwise.
That said, I really doubt most people are using the system as efficiently as you are.
Like I said in my earlier post, if I bother to do admiralty at all, I just set it and forget it, collect the next day. It'll payout between 2000-3500 Dil on average with a lump sum of 30k every 10 - 12 days.
I don't think that's outrageous tbh, and helps people advance in game who may not otherwise have a lot of game time.
If someone can only play a few hours week (or less), admiralty rewards (or doffing/contraband for that matter) are an easy way to motivate them to continue logging in when time permits. Because of these systems, a casual with very little time can feel a sense of progression that cannot be achieved by running 1 or 2 queues a day in their limited playtime.
I just feel that correlating Admiralty use/rewards to dead queues is a mistake. And nerfing said rewards could be a detriment to more casual types of players.
But in reading your responses, I believe you understand it's a lot more complicated, and a multifaceted problem.
And as such this is a productive conversation.
I will conclude by saying that I'm on board with many people here in their suggestions to;
- Restore the old Queue UI. (I think the new one is universally hated)
- Re-implement the daily/hourly queue bonus rotation. (Or add a second bar to the Endeavor system that is Queue specific)
- Re-evaluate and normalize rewards across all queues.
They could sweeten the pot even further by awarding an account bound mark box for the first queued mission you play per day.
If that doesn't work.. I honestly don't think anything will.
This is actually a good point as well.
As much as the rep system has done to deflate queue population, the 'balance changes' have done just as much. Why? Because the 'average' player sits in that middle ground DPS wise and they were the hardest hit by the changes. The targets of the pass, those at the extreme high end simply made a few adaptations and life went on. For others though, low cost means of achieving effectiveness.. things like Plasma Consoles, Leech Console, Feedback Pulse trait from the free event ship, all that stuff hurt the 'average' player far more then the high end. Many of those players left when their builds were destroyed because they aren't 'space rich' and couldn't just go out and buy lobi/lockbox items and traits to replace the items they used to have easy access too.
Queues were struggling before they did the round of super nerfs. Between the nerfs and the HORRIBLE new Queue UI that absolutely no one wanted.. it's a miracle that queues ever see any activity at all.
But, good post.
No need to apologize, everything is cool.
Yes this is a multi-faceted problem. Things need to be done so that players both want and enjoy the multiplayer aspects of STO.
I doubt the new queue UI will ever be rolled back. That ship has gone and sailed. A good start would be to fix what we have now and make it better. A good start would be to remove the "Join Queue" button. Ticking the tick box next to an STF should queue you in.
I like points 2 and 3.
Good consumables have some value though. Before all those speed boosts came in, Alhena runs were a part of many player's daily routines.
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The admiralty system is just fine this game has been nerefed enough we don't need another nerf because you don't like the admiralty system. I am personally tired of all the grind grind grind
How I could see it working is that on normal difficulty you would get one to two elite marks for completing the optional objectives in the stf, while in advanced and elite you would get one or two elite marks respectively for completing those difficulties while also gaining additional elite marks for completing optional objectives (if the stfs get additional objectives in high difficulties it would relate to that difficulty's optional objective.). To me this would have been a better than the failure condition they attempted in delta rising.