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Bring back random rewards to Q's and special gear.
newromulan
Member Posts: 230 Arc User
If you remember the old days with the omega STF runs, you got random prototype drops on each run. People complained because someone could run it one time and get the drop or 200 and not get the drop.Yeah that was frustrating, but when you finally got it, it felt awesome.
Perhaps they could create some special gear for each major Que and have a random drop, plus if you run it X number of times you still get it. They could even make the random drop not happen every run as in the old system, I believe someone in the team got the prototype drop needed for the gear.
Thoughs? Perhaps this could bring some life back to the q's with some nice unique gear created.
Perhaps they could create some special gear for each major Que and have a random drop, plus if you run it X number of times you still get it. They could even make the random drop not happen every run as in the old system, I believe someone in the team got the prototype drop needed for the gear.
Thoughs? Perhaps this could bring some life back to the q's with some nice unique gear created.
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The latter did not excuse the former. It was just a slight upswing after a long downward slide into oblivion.
Basically reputations fixed queue rewards; a given amount of work (as quantified through marks, dil, and EC) results in a given reward. If you add a randomized chance to earn rep project gear without inputs, you inject the system with the same old unhealthy battle against the law of independent probabilities (because why spend dil when you might get something for free? Spending resources for rep gear could easily become be a sad surrender once one's exceeded their tolerances for the RNG, a bad situation which we're free of now in simply having required costs.)
What we have now is fine. I'd even call it good. If you want thrills, the lock boxes are well set to offer it.
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Some of us would rather the game be a game and not work.
And the point of unique drops is not to give rep project gear, but something new that can't be acquired anywhere else.
Nice saying, but it means nothing (because it relies on an unspoken assumption of what defines a game). There are plenty of games that don't involve dice rolling (though plenty that do) and while you can say that STO lacks randomization in this one element there are other ways that STO involves does involve randomization to add spontaneity to gameplay (ex. crit calculation, lock boxes, many enemy spawns.) There's no definite need to resurrect a bad (ie. horrendously dysfunctional) system on top of it's popular successor (Cryptic wouldn't keep investing in new reps if people weren't consistently engaging with them) simply on the basis that the OP wants a very particular kind of thrill (in spite of available alternatives. Ex. CCA.)
Which gets us right back to oblivion, it's of no help to the idea.
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Original Cryptic Forum Name: Spartan (member #124)
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I'd much rather the developers spend their time doing something else than creating ultra-rare loot drops that you need to grind specific queues to have a slight chance of getting, someday.
It's the difference between buying a pack of trading cards and getting graded (even on a pass-fail basis) based on a teacher's dice roll. Queue rewards should be (largely) consistent because they follow from a single, well defined activity. Vary those too much, and the effort you put into the queue seems largely arbitrary and unjustified in that moment. You might fail with a lock box, but it's an immediate reflection on the purchase, not the game you just played (regardless, that remains a worthwhile activity. You might just spend your resources differently if you get fed up with the RNG.)
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> Would you rather have this than bug fixes or a new story episode with its own set of reward gear? I would not.
Mmo are a grind. How many times do people run a new episode? How many times do you do those of episodes in a team? The team based play of STO is dying. I am just suggesting a way to put some incentives for replaying the q's
One issue with the stf is that outside of the most profitable ones once you get what is in the rep projects you dont need to do those stf anymore, the draw an incentive is gone at that point to appeal to the players to actually que fo the content. I would definitely say that a rework of the reward system to make the stfs that have a lower payout to time ratio (that are from being longer or more complex compared to the easier/simpler ones) a higher payout would be nice too.
Who wants to run a queue for 15 minutes and only get 20 something marks when you can run one for 2-5 minutes and get 60-70 or more?
As to the random drops... the original rep gear tech drops were brutal, and caused people to burn out. Adding a CHANCE to get a special tech drop to an underperforming queue will not revive the queue. It will just add another layer of frustration, and another way for some people to rub it in others faces that they got the tech easily while others aren't so lucky.
In THEORY the OP idea is interesting. But in practice... not so much.
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Reputations and random gear rewards are not mutually exclusive. Cryptic could do both. Back in the days of Borg technology drops going for this random chance was the only option to aquire top level gear for your ship. That's no longer the case.
I got so sick of doing them, that I vowed to never do another Borg STF again, and to this day, it still holds true.
I would rather we stick with what we have now, thanks..
But there is a nice middle ground here..
Keep all the rep systems and everything else just like they are. Make the random rewards for queues be Mark XIV Ultra Rare versions for Advanced and Mk XIV Epics for Elite. These would not be guaranteed drops, they would be RnG dependent, all five members of the team would have a small random chance for a reward.
Say you want the Borg space set. Cool.. you can run reps like you do now and get the Very Rare or Ultra Rare items (provided you completed objective on an AOY character) or you can run queues associated with that reputation and have a chance to get it 'free.'
As an added incentive for people that might already have all the gear they want make the dropped gear tradeable and sellable on the exchange. Now even the fully geared players will run the missions for a chance to score something they can sell.
We have all seen how popular lock boxes are, people will pull the lever on that slot machine over and over and over. People will flock to queues just for a chance of getting a 'special shiny.' Cryptic could control the odds to make sure items aren't too easy to get. Shorter queues like ISA or CCA could even have a lower chance then a Queue that takes more time and effort.
More time invested, more chance of payoff. That's how it should be.
You still get the gear from reps, but you have a (very low) chance to make any item of your choice go epic.
I explained in the post the difference between the reward variant and the reputation variant. Namely the fact that the award can be up to epic quality and tradable.
On one hand I hated the old setup because I not only had terrible RNG chances. But what I really wanted was the ground set and I sucked on the ground.
But having unique rewards per map also meant every map was actually played. I would queue up for all three space maps and just go to who popped first and it was a race to see which one did. (Talking borg rep obviously)
But playing the same map 300 times to get one piece of gear that when all were assembled meant. You are slightly better at beating that particular enemy. Now do it all over again for the higher grade of the same gear. . . .
So you really need a hybrid. The rep and decent gear from points. And an RNG as has been suggested. Maybe components. All three borg space maps complete you can turn the three components into a unique borg shuttle. Ground you collect bits to have a new unique borg Boff, or better yet an arm cannon that actually sits on your arm? Maybe let the LTS subscribers have the black body suit the borg boffs get?
Just a thought.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
For somebody with lots of alts (partially in the making) tradable items have a much bigger wroth. I don’t give a poo about 5k Omega marks on toon A but 50 marks of choice from the new endeavor for toon B are quite a different thing.
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Fact is stuff you can get from a store is not unique or special. Being able to buy at any time completely removes any need to look for drops. And seeing as none of that stuff is actually necessary for anything...it's just not interesting in any way. I generally don't get rep gear except the ground sets for the costume unlock and having them drop from some queue would make them worth even less.
They wouldn't develop a worthwhile price on the exchange either, regardless of rarity, since even the most expensive rep projects cost only a bit over one key's worth of dilithium-equivalent.
Well, it's hypothetical at this point and there is no way to prove either way what would happen. I will just say my view on this is the 100% complete opposite of every word you have written. I mean that respectfully of course, I just find myself in complete disagreement with you on this one.
Just curious, what would you propose to get queues active again? What reward do you think would make them worth your time that's also within reasonable expectations?
Perhaps not, I don't see a lot of people playing queues that awarded gear from the Dyson Set.
You could make the reward something highly desirable like say 1 Master Key, but this still wouldn't get people into a variety of queues. If you did something like that, then the queue reward would have to rotate from week to week. First week it's Borg Queues, next week, Tzenkethi, etc.
If you make the reward highly desirable, but place it on every queue, you'll still have the problem of people just running 1-3 queues to try and get it and ignoring everything else.
Balancing the base numeric rewards (dil/marks) to average completion time and/or actual difficulty (failure rate) wouldn't hurt either, to counter the "CCA effect."
Well if you have explained this many times then my apologies because I didn't see those posts.
This still doesn't answer the question though, what type of unique rewards? You mean inventing entirely new things that don't currently exist and offering them as queue rewards?
I understand that you want the queues to offer something unique and special, I am just not getting what exactly you mean by this.