To improve teamplay and improve roleplaying the respawning option should be removed from PVE (it's dabatble if it should be remove totaly or only from Advance or Elite PVE's).
This way the need for Sci and Eng healers in a team becomes more important to be able to achieve the PVE goal. Team play becames more important. And ther will be more gratitude towards each other like saying "thanks for the heal, I almost died" phrase will be seen more often etc.
It's a bid odd to die in a PVE but just be able to respawn after some seconds, like nothing has happend. When death is permanent in a PVE, people will have to take more care about each other, hence improving teamplay.
Totally and utterly agree! The lack of fail and total fail options is stopping people from actually learning how to play. So what we have now is alot of players with entitlement issues. Personally I love an extremely challenging game, but STO is now space farmville with macros and AFK'ers.
"You don't want to patrol!? You don't want to escort!? You don't want to defend the Federation's Starbases!? Then why are you flying my Starships!? If you were a Klingon you'd be killed on the spot, but lucky for you.....you WERE in Starfleet. Let's see how New Zealand Penal Colony suits you." Adm A. Necheyev.
To improve teamplay and improve roleplaying the respawning option should be removed from PVE (it's dabatble if it should be remove totaly or only from Advance or Elite PVE's).
This way the need for Sci and Eng healers in a team becomes more important to be able to achieve the PVE goal. Team play becames more important. And ther will be more gratitude towards each other like saying "thanks for the heal, I almost died" phrase will be seen more often etc.
It's a bid odd to die in a PVE but just be able to respawn after some seconds, like nothing has happend. When death is permanent in a PVE, people will have to take more care about each other, hence improving teamplay.
Totally and utterly agree! The lack of fail and total fail options is stopping people from actually learning how to play. So what we have now is alot of players with entitlement issues. Personally I love an extremely challenging game, but STO is now space farmville with macros and AFK'ers.
Space Farmville? HAH!
New Doff Assignment:
Provide Fertilizer for Neighbor
Don't agree that the lack of a fail condition is what is causing players to not learn the mechanics, but more to the point making learning to do the stfs an the optional objectives of the stfs. To me it is actually the lack of incentive to learn things like the mechanics, strats of a stf, or how to do the optionals in the stfs. How much added benefit do you gain honestly for completing the optionals of an stf, when compared to just finishing the stf regardless. While then add in many times it is the elite marks that advanced stfs give that is the main incentive to do that content, which are gained if you finish the stf with getting the optionals or not. If you shake up this fact by creating a higher value to completing the optionals, either thru higher amount of marks gained, or that to gain the elite marks you need to have completed the optional objectives of the stfs that might entice players to learn.
I think the OP doesn't go far enough tbh. I've been arguing to for permanent character death for years now. It makes sense from both a storyline perspective and a balancing perspective. If your toon dies, you'd have to start over again.
It would also promote learning how the game works instead of joining a match without any real idea what's going on.
How about no? The servers would be dead in a week. I'm sorry, but there's a limit to how much realism I actually want in my gameplay, and having to redo potentially years worth of work because one slip up does not appeal to me--or, I think, to--speaking conservatively--ninety-five percent of STO's playerbase.
Of course, if you're trying to kill the game, that would be an excellent way to go about it.
The perma-death does work that way. But, that's if it's implemented in the "on death" manner. The perma-death from Wizardry was a bit different. It was on a timer. When you died, if no one is around to resurrect you, then you "respawn" as a ghost at the last shrine you were at. Then you have like 15 minutes to return to your corpse. IF you didn't make it to you corpse in time, then the perma-death happened.
With this setup it discourages afking and botting. I think the main thing that killed the idea here was, you lost all the the items on your character when it happened. This included any cash shop items. Had they set it to return the cash shop items upon perma-death, it would have likely went over much better.
But I will admit, the perma-death system isn't for everyone. Because it's a constant reminder that you're playing a game, and not something important. Which people forget, STO is nothing important, it's just a game after all. This is true of any game.
When a game becomes something important to you and ceases to be just a game. Then it might be time to re-evaluate your life.
It being a game is exactly why I say it's a bad idea. Because having to redo potentially years' worth of effort is not fun. That's one thing I like about STO: it's not so tough that you need to invest unhealthy amounts of time and effort in it to have fun with it. If I wanted the kind of consequences perma-death has, I'd play EVE.
I think the OP doesn't go far enough tbh. I've been arguing to for permanent character death for years now. It makes sense from both a storyline perspective and a balancing perspective. If your toon dies, you'd have to start over again.
It would also promote learning how the game works instead of joining a match without any real idea what's going on.
How about no? The servers would be dead in a week. I'm sorry, but there's a limit to how much realism I actually want in my gameplay, and having to redo potentially years worth of work because one slip up does not appeal to me--or, I think, to--speaking conservatively--ninety-five percent of STO's playerbase.
Of course, if you're trying to kill the game, that would be an excellent way to go about it.
The perma-death does work that way. But, that's if it's implemented in the "on death" manner. The perma-death from Wizardry was a bit different. It was on a timer. When you died, if no one is around to resurrect you, then you "respawn" as a ghost at the last shrine you were at. Then you have like 15 minutes to return to your corpse. IF you didn't make it to you corpse in time, then the perma-death happened.
With this setup it discourages afking and botting. I think the main thing that killed the idea here was, you lost all the the items on your character when it happened. This included any cash shop items. Had they set it to return the cash shop items upon perma-death, it would have likely went over much better.
But I will admit, the perma-death system isn't for everyone. Because it's a constant reminder that you're playing a game, and not something important. Which people forget, STO is nothing important, it's just a game after all. This is true of any game.
When a game becomes something important to you and ceases to be just a game. Then it might be time to re-evaluate your life.
It being a game is exactly why I say it's a bad idea. Because having to redo potentially years' worth of effort is not fun. That's one thing I like about STO: it's not so tough that you need to invest unhealthy amounts of time and effort in it to have fun with it. If I wanted the kind of consequences perma-death has, I'd play EVE.
For STO a perma-death wouldn't even hurt that much. Just in the lock box/lobi items. Which can be re-obtained.
But, given STO is the game that it is. Instead of a perma-death. I'd say more of a enforced shore leave. You know, after a certain amount of time passes, that character can only login and doff/adm for say a week. This time can happen quicker, depending on how many times you die. This can also account for ship maintenance time. This doesn't cost the player anything. Just means for a week they play a different character.
Well we can add play the feature episode and events as well. Wouldn't want to cut them out of that, if there is one.
For this, I'd base it off hours played on a character. That way when you hit the amount of time played, that character goes down for a week. Then add time to that counter for every death, speeding up the process. I'd pair this with a X amount of deaths in a certain time frame, puts the character into shore leave.
I, for one, avoid the queues because they tend to be polluted with people like the OP, who believe that you should know every inch of the mission you're about to undertake before you ever queue for it the first time.
That's one of the things that drove me away from WoW, and were this game to become as epeen-obsessed as that one, I'd have to leave it too. And I don't want to have to leave.
And trennan, if you miss the Holy Trinity so desperately, by all means, go and play a game with rigidly-defined classes where that sort of thing is de rigeur. Let's not try to make every MMO in existence match that one straitjacket, though, okay?
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,669Community Moderator
For this, I'd base it off hours played on a character. That way when you hit the amount of time played, that character goes down for a week. Then add time to that counter for every death, speeding up the process. I'd pair this with a X amount of deaths in a certain time frame, puts the character into shore leave.
Eh... I'm not sure. It basically penalizes you for playing your main essentially. You played X Hours and died Y amount of times? Lets see how many weeks your main's locked down... well... looks like your main's gonna be on Shore Leave for 52 weeks. Enjoy!
Eh... no. Even if you're allowed to DOff/Admiralty and Events... that's kinda one big, huge AFK Ban on pretty much every other piece of content in the game.
If this is to discourage dieing... we need something other than forced time on other characters. There are way too many issues with forced shore leave, such as penalizing people for experimenting with builds. I tried modifying my Tetryon build today by replacing the Nukara set with the 3 piece Tzenkethi set... and doing the Endeavor as a test run.
Was painful thanks to the Terrans.
Would probably be better if there was some more serious penalties for having X number of injuries without healing/fixing them, and maybe any left untreated gradually get worse over time. Sure your performance already suffers, but I still occasionally run into people who have so many on their status bar you'd swear they were making a collection! Almost feels like you just LOOK at them and they collapse!
I can't take it anymore! Could everyone just chill out for two seconds before something CRAZY happens again?!
The nut who actually ground out many packs. The resident forum voice of reason (I HAZ FORUM REP! YAY!)
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite colored text = mod mode
EverQuest had an unforgiving death experience. It's also probably the best MMO ever made and it says a lot that the only MMOs that stack up to it are either discontinued (Asherons Call) or, in the case of WOW, over a decade old.
The fact that the game is so cut and paste easy and completely devoid of anything resembling a penalty is a a primary factor why we have the whiny, incompetent playerbase we're currently stuck with.
Permanent death works on multiple levels: good players remain good; bad players get better or leave. The whales are generally competent players, so its the undesirables that will move on to Hello Kitty Online or whatever.
Perma death options would need to be handled carefully. A dead man can't learn new things and foresight is needed on every single occasion where combat is involved. one mistake or one bad move and that would be the end of it and punishing players for learning the mechanics isn't something you should be doing. Remember at one point you were also like everyone else here and i would have a hard time thinking you were mister perfect the first time out or even when you had accidents along the way that helped you develop as a player.
You put perma death on everything, it's more a downside than a plus side, it only pushes those elistist players further away from everyone else while everyone else struggles with how steep a learning curve it is to play like that. Regardless how disconnected you feel from everyone else, if you want more people to become like yourself, to become really good at what they do? They need to have the chance to fail every once in a while without penalty to help them become better. If you just take away the learning experience and punish players for it, a lot of players will feel it is not worth the effort to grind a character along because circumstances conspire to have them killed and need to begin again from zero even when it isn't their fault.
The thing is if you have so completely disconnected yourself from the community and play the same content with the same people always laughing at people beneath you when they try and fail, how is what you are doing any different from those struggling and failing with perma-death? you are not learning anything and all you are doing is failing those around you, including yourself.
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
It never ceases to amaze me that such a huge number of people play STO and then want it to a clone of be more like some other game. This isn't EVE, Everquest, WOW or whatever other game, this is STO. I've played most of the others except EVE, and if I feel like playing a game that is more like game X, I go play game X.
If you want to play a game more like some other game, go play that other game. There are plenty of players that want STO to be more like .... STO.....that I'm sure it won't go under if it loses the people that prefer how some other game plays.
How about you don't respawn instead and allow me to resurrect with dignity when I do something incredibly stupid?
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If there are posts here that do not appeal to you, or opinions you disagree with, the best way to deal with that is to resist the urge to add comments. Instead, engage with the content you like! Don't feed the trolls!
For this, I'd base it off hours played on a character. That way when you hit the amount of time played, that character goes down for a week. Then add time to that counter for every death, speeding up the process. I'd pair this with a X amount of deaths in a certain time frame, puts the character into shore leave.
Eh... I'm not sure. It basically penalizes you for playing your main essentially. You played X Hours and died Y amount of times? Lets see how many weeks your main's locked down... well... looks like your main's gonna be on Shore Leave for 52 weeks. Enjoy!
Eh... no. Even if you're allowed to DOff/Admiralty and Events... that's kinda one big, huge AFK Ban on pretty much every other piece of content in the game.
If this is to discourage dieing... we need something other than forced time on other characters. There are way too many issues with forced shore leave, such as penalizing people for experimenting with builds. I tried modifying my Tetryon build today by replacing the Nukara set with the 3 piece Tzenkethi set... and doing the Endeavor as a test run.
Was painful thanks to the Terrans.
Would probably be better if there was some more serious penalties for having X number of injuries without healing/fixing them, and maybe any left untreated gradually get worse over time. Sure your performance already suffers, but I still occasionally run into people who have so many on their status bar you'd swear they were making a collection! Almost feels like you just LOOK at them and they collapse!
Nah the lock down is only a week long. Death speeds up how often that week comes around.
For example the shore leave happens on a quarterly basis, or every 90 days of time played. That's 2,160 hours. But this doesn't actually work out well. Since on average most players play, as a guess, 6 hours a day. In this it would take a player 360 days to hit the enforced shore leave, without death. Even using this on just a months worth of time, 30 days or 720 hours. It would still take 120 days at the average of 6 hours of play time per day to reach. But we can use that number.
The player starts with 720 hours.
Death takes 1 hour from that.
Now the thing here, would be the number of times one dies in a certain amount of time. Let's say 10 deaths in a day drops 20 hours off that time. Then perhaps 100 deaths per week would where the shore leave starts. These are two relatively large numbers for deaths in the game.
Then with this, with the injury part you mentioned. This enforced shore leave could clear all those from a player and their ship.
On the injury part. The only thing I can think of here, to go with that. Would be to limit what content the injured captain can do. The main thing that irked me about the injury system here, is that they don't heal over time. But most players know how to clear these, and that's generally not long after they get them. But, if you limit the content that injured captain can do, it comes with the problem of how many of what injuries does this start to happen?
Summary: make other people play the way I want them to so I can be a healer again
No thanks. STO is a casual-friendly mostly single-player MMO with a bit of grouping for variety. Thankfully there is no chance that the developers will listen to the idea of forcing players to group as tank-dps-healer just because you like WoW.
How about no? OP the ques are already just about dead, this would just kill them out right.
How do you know? Maybe it will atract players?
How will adding a feature chase people away?
They could even have no respwan in PVE as a toggle option. So people can play as is, or without respawn. And like there is a reward difference/increase now between normal, adv, elite there could be also when activating no respawn mode.
Only Miracle Workers should be able to Resurrect. Where do you think they got their name from.
Permanent death? Forget it, no one would risk doing anything under those circumstances. Cryptic wouldn't like it either as it would suppress the sale of Keys to open Lockboxes and R&D Promotions, and the purchase of Lobi Store items, etc. as most of that stuff is Character Bound that cannot be transferred to another Character on the Account. Either not thought through or just another example of Rule of Acquisition 239.
Post edited by ltminns on
'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.'
Only Miracle Workers should be able to Resurrect. Where do you think they got their name from.
Permanent death? Forget it, no one would risk doing anything under those circumstances. Cryptic wouldn't like it either as it would suppress the sale of Keys to open Lockboxes and R&D Promotions, and the purchase of Lobi Store items, etc. as most of that stuff is Character Bound that cannot be transferred to another Character on the Account. Either not thought through or just another example if Rule of Acquisition 239.
This. C'mon, people, think through what would be lost: anything Lobi, anything Lockbox, a good number of high-level regular equipment--I never have been able to work out what makes an item account bound sometimes, character bound othertimes; I've got some otherwise identical consoles that are one or the other--, Rep gear, rare DOffs, rare BOffs...
I'm sorry, but perma-death is not "incentive to learn the game", it's incentive to leave it entirely. When one slip or simple instant of bad luck can wreck hours, weeks, months, years of work... No. You guys keep trying to say this reminds people it's just a game--but when you're doing something for fun, losing all your stuff isn't.
How do you know? Maybe it will atract players?
How will adding a feature chase people away?
Were you around for the rework of the difficulty levels for STFs when Delta Rising launched? Turning optionals into required the higher you go?
Infected Space Advanced took the normal optional of not letting a nanite sphere heal a transformer, and made it mandatory or instant fail. Delta Rising was also the rise of HP sponges that basically made everyone's build subpar at the time. Those two combined turned STFs into easily trolled content. I actually had a run where some bozo went "looking for his spec point" in a generator... on the opposite side of the map from us. He failed us ON PURPOSE... just for teh lulz. And we had to wait a full half hour to try again.
So depending on how a feature is implimented... could actually drive people away rather than attract them.
I can't take it anymore! Could everyone just chill out for two seconds before something CRAZY happens again?!
The nut who actually ground out many packs. The resident forum voice of reason (I HAZ FORUM REP! YAY!)
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite colored text = mod mode
How do you know? Maybe it will atract players?
How will adding a feature chase people away?
Were you around for the rework of the difficulty levels for STFs when Delta Rising launched? Turning optionals into required the higher you go?
Infected Space Advanced took the normal optional of not letting a nanite sphere heal a transformer, and made it mandatory or instant fail. Delta Rising was also the rise of HP sponges that basically made everyone's build subpar at the time. Those two combined turned STFs into easily trolled content. I actually had a run where some bozo went "looking for his spec point" in a generator... on the opposite side of the map from us. He failed us ON PURPOSE... just for teh lulz. And we had to wait a full half hour to try again.
So depending on how a feature is implimented... could actually drive people away rather than attract them.
Yeah the idea of turning optionals into failure conditions is not that good, except on maybe elite difficulty. I personally always thought that instead of making optional objectives into failure conditions, give a tangible an good incentive to do the optionals (the added marks you gain from the optionals I don't think is enough though). Things like making it that the optional objectives in normal an advanced difficulties of the stfs might give you either additional elite marks, or a chance to gain additional elite marks and/or chance at some unique rewards.
Comments
Totally and utterly agree! The lack of fail and total fail options is stopping people from actually learning how to play. So what we have now is alot of players with entitlement issues. Personally I love an extremely challenging game, but STO is now space farmville with macros and AFK'ers.
Space Farmville? HAH!
New Doff Assignment:
Provide Fertilizer for Neighbor
It being a game is exactly why I say it's a bad idea. Because having to redo potentially years' worth of effort is not fun. That's one thing I like about STO: it's not so tough that you need to invest unhealthy amounts of time and effort in it to have fun with it. If I wanted the kind of consequences perma-death has, I'd play EVE.
For STO a perma-death wouldn't even hurt that much. Just in the lock box/lobi items. Which can be re-obtained.
But, given STO is the game that it is. Instead of a perma-death. I'd say more of a enforced shore leave. You know, after a certain amount of time passes, that character can only login and doff/adm for say a week. This time can happen quicker, depending on how many times you die. This can also account for ship maintenance time. This doesn't cost the player anything. Just means for a week they play a different character.
Well we can add play the feature episode and events as well. Wouldn't want to cut them out of that, if there is one.
For this, I'd base it off hours played on a character. That way when you hit the amount of time played, that character goes down for a week. Then add time to that counter for every death, speeding up the process. I'd pair this with a X amount of deaths in a certain time frame, puts the character into shore leave.
That's one of the things that drove me away from WoW, and were this game to become as epeen-obsessed as that one, I'd have to leave it too. And I don't want to have to leave.
And trennan, if you miss the Holy Trinity so desperately, by all means, go and play a game with rigidly-defined classes where that sort of thing is de rigeur. Let's not try to make every MMO in existence match that one straitjacket, though, okay?
Eh... I'm not sure. It basically penalizes you for playing your main essentially. You played X Hours and died Y amount of times? Lets see how many weeks your main's locked down... well... looks like your main's gonna be on Shore Leave for 52 weeks. Enjoy!
Eh... no. Even if you're allowed to DOff/Admiralty and Events... that's kinda one big, huge AFK Ban on pretty much every other piece of content in the game.
If this is to discourage dieing... we need something other than forced time on other characters. There are way too many issues with forced shore leave, such as penalizing people for experimenting with builds. I tried modifying my Tetryon build today by replacing the Nukara set with the 3 piece Tzenkethi set... and doing the Endeavor as a test run.
Was painful thanks to the Terrans.
Would probably be better if there was some more serious penalties for having X number of injuries without healing/fixing them, and maybe any left untreated gradually get worse over time. Sure your performance already suffers, but I still occasionally run into people who have so many on their status bar you'd swear they were making a collection! Almost feels like you just LOOK at them and they collapse!
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
Perma death options would need to be handled carefully. A dead man can't learn new things and foresight is needed on every single occasion where combat is involved. one mistake or one bad move and that would be the end of it and punishing players for learning the mechanics isn't something you should be doing. Remember at one point you were also like everyone else here and i would have a hard time thinking you were mister perfect the first time out or even when you had accidents along the way that helped you develop as a player.
You put perma death on everything, it's more a downside than a plus side, it only pushes those elistist players further away from everyone else while everyone else struggles with how steep a learning curve it is to play like that. Regardless how disconnected you feel from everyone else, if you want more people to become like yourself, to become really good at what they do? They need to have the chance to fail every once in a while without penalty to help them become better. If you just take away the learning experience and punish players for it, a lot of players will feel it is not worth the effort to grind a character along because circumstances conspire to have them killed and need to begin again from zero even when it isn't their fault.
The thing is if you have so completely disconnected yourself from the community and play the same content with the same people always laughing at people beneath you when they try and fail, how is what you are doing any different from those struggling and failing with perma-death? you are not learning anything and all you are doing is failing those around you, including yourself.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
If you want to play a game more like some other game, go play that other game. There are plenty of players that want STO to be more like .... STO.....that I'm sure it won't go under if it loses the people that prefer how some other game plays.
If there are posts here that do not appeal to you, or opinions you disagree with, the best way to deal with that is to resist the urge to add comments. Instead, engage with the content you like! Don't feed the trolls!
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Nah the lock down is only a week long. Death speeds up how often that week comes around.
For example the shore leave happens on a quarterly basis, or every 90 days of time played. That's 2,160 hours. But this doesn't actually work out well. Since on average most players play, as a guess, 6 hours a day. In this it would take a player 360 days to hit the enforced shore leave, without death. Even using this on just a months worth of time, 30 days or 720 hours. It would still take 120 days at the average of 6 hours of play time per day to reach. But we can use that number.
The player starts with 720 hours.
Death takes 1 hour from that.
Now the thing here, would be the number of times one dies in a certain amount of time. Let's say 10 deaths in a day drops 20 hours off that time. Then perhaps 100 deaths per week would where the shore leave starts. These are two relatively large numbers for deaths in the game.
Then with this, with the injury part you mentioned. This enforced shore leave could clear all those from a player and their ship.
On the injury part. The only thing I can think of here, to go with that. Would be to limit what content the injured captain can do. The main thing that irked me about the injury system here, is that they don't heal over time. But most players know how to clear these, and that's generally not long after they get them. But, if you limit the content that injured captain can do, it comes with the problem of how many of what injuries does this start to happen?
I dont play WoW and never have.
How do you know? Maybe it will atract players?
How will adding a feature chase people away?
They could even have no respwan in PVE as a toggle option. So people can play as is, or without respawn. And like there is a reward difference/increase now between normal, adv, elite there could be also when activating no respawn mode.
STO IS A GAME! It should not ever become a lifestyle choice.
Permanent death? Forget it, no one would risk doing anything under those circumstances. Cryptic wouldn't like it either as it would suppress the sale of Keys to open Lockboxes and R&D Promotions, and the purchase of Lobi Store items, etc. as most of that stuff is Character Bound that cannot be transferred to another Character on the Account. Either not thought through or just another example of Rule of Acquisition 239.
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.'
This. C'mon, people, think through what would be lost: anything Lobi, anything Lockbox, a good number of high-level regular equipment--I never have been able to work out what makes an item account bound sometimes, character bound othertimes; I've got some otherwise identical consoles that are one or the other--, Rep gear, rare DOffs, rare BOffs...
I'm sorry, but perma-death is not "incentive to learn the game", it's incentive to leave it entirely. When one slip or simple instant of bad luck can wreck hours, weeks, months, years of work... No. You guys keep trying to say this reminds people it's just a game--but when you're doing something for fun, losing all your stuff isn't.
Were you around for the rework of the difficulty levels for STFs when Delta Rising launched? Turning optionals into required the higher you go?
Infected Space Advanced took the normal optional of not letting a nanite sphere heal a transformer, and made it mandatory or instant fail. Delta Rising was also the rise of HP sponges that basically made everyone's build subpar at the time. Those two combined turned STFs into easily trolled content. I actually had a run where some bozo went "looking for his spec point" in a generator... on the opposite side of the map from us. He failed us ON PURPOSE... just for teh lulz. And we had to wait a full half hour to try again.
So depending on how a feature is implimented... could actually drive people away rather than attract them.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
Yeah the idea of turning optionals into failure conditions is not that good, except on maybe elite difficulty. I personally always thought that instead of making optional objectives into failure conditions, give a tangible an good incentive to do the optionals (the added marks you gain from the optionals I don't think is enough though). Things like making it that the optional objectives in normal an advanced difficulties of the stfs might give you either additional elite marks, or a chance to gain additional elite marks and/or chance at some unique rewards.