Especially considering that they're all holdings. Look in your Fleet window. What tab are they all under? Holdings. In Settings there is one for "Manage Fleet Holdings." That allows you to manage them all, including the Starbase. It's not a distinct category of its own.
When they gave us the Embassy, the blog for it mentioned "smaller holdings" but then went on to give those a category name that I don't think that we ever heard again, Outposts. The Colony is obviously not an Outpost, it's a larger holding, like the Starbase.
End rant about weird categorical error.
This is an MMO, not a Star Trek episode simulator. That would make for a terrible game.
Did they take that route. NO. They decided to make a Starbase HOLDING more expensive than the main Starbase. They scr*wed the pooch on this one.
I don't see why the starbase should by definition be the most expensive. Especially judging from a story point of view, a colony will be way more expensive than the starbase. And just because the starbase used to be the main construction project, there's no reason from a story perspective why that cannot change.
From a gaming perspective I would agree, but not because it is larger than the starbase, but because it offers way less rewards/incentives to complete than the cheaper starbase does. And it comes quite late in the game's life cycle. Then again, count it as a vanity project for the fleets who can afford it. Others are not missing out on many things giving a real advantage.
It has a similar amount of actual goods available, possibly even more, since warp cores, secondary deflectors, kit frames and kit modules didn't even exist when the Starbase fleet holding was introduced. It's really only missing the fleet ships. The expense for the thing is debatable. It uses more of desired currencies, by quite a lot, even, but doesn't have things that destroy fleet credits, like DOffs do in the other holding (at least the way that most people get them) or the provisions from the smaller holdings.
Getting hung up on the word "holding" is a bit of a ridiculous semantic game. They're all holdings, including the Starbase. Replacing nearly everything in the main xp-generating projects with dilithium was definitely quite a bit too far, but the values used are right about in line with where they would have been on the Starbase if those types of projects had been similarly converted to dilthium. Look at the Starbase provisioning projects that generate 500 xp and some provisions compared to the ones for the colony, then extrapolate that comparison to the 1,000 xp projects.
People on these forums have a tendency to fixate on semantics. See also, any discussion about ships and how something must have feature X because the name has word Y in it, debates about the word "universal" as it applies to consoles or boff slots, etc...
Replacing everything with dilithium is precisely what's been killing this game since DR. Rewards and costs must be sufficiently differentiated for there to be a reason to engage in diverse gameplay instead of dumb grinding of the Best Rewarding Content. Personally, I preferred the original holding cost model, that included rare consumables, equipment items and type-specific non-white doffs. And when fleet marks required specific missions to gain instead of coming up everywhere for free.
The provision model for the colony is certainly better than the pointlessly complicated fleet credit sink of the previous ones, but replacing most of the requirements with dilithium negated much of the effect.
Replacing everything with dilithium is precisely what's been killing this game since DR. Rewards and costs must be sufficiently differentiated for there to be a reason to engage in diverse gameplay instead of dumb grinding of the Best Rewarding Content. Personally, I preferred the original holding cost model, that included rare consumables, equipment items and type-specific non-white doffs. And when fleet marks required specific missions to gain instead of coming up everywhere for free.
The provision model for the colony is certainly better than the pointlessly complicated fleet credit sink of the previous ones, but replacing most of the requirements with dilithium negated much of the effect.
I have to agree with you here.
The original methods at least had varied means of supporting the starbase system so that it wasn't just one massive grind for dilithium like it is now. All sorts of players could contribute as they all had different resources to apply to the projects. Some farmed doffs and dumped spare whites into the SB. Others were commodity traders who would get the best deals via Ferengi dealers or freighters. And you had to run actual fleet missions to get flarks as well which populated those queues.
The colony was a nice change with the mining of provision and also with the simulation to get tonnes of them for everyone. But swapping most to dilithium was a poor move and has resulted in the same holding stagnation you saw in the past. Bigger fleets like my own will survive this, those smaller and with less active players/armadas will loose out and exhaust themselves.
Well we also have had a few new sinks added as well. Crafting and its adjunct, the Phoenix Prize Pack Events to be specific.
Just because it is a five Tier HOLDING does not mean that each of the Tiers needs to be the equivalent XP-wise to the Starbase. Instead of jumping up to 250k XP for each of the Sub-Holdings they could have approached it like Reputation Tiers. That is 5k, 15k, 32.5k, 60k, and 100k XP.
You do know that we are HELPING the Lukari/Kentari NOT doing this all on our own.
'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.'
Just because it is a five Tier HOLDING does not mean that each of the Tiers needs to be the equivalent XP-wise to the Starbase. Instead of jumping up to 250k XP for each of the Sub-Holdings they could have approached it like Reputation Tiers. That is 5k, 15k, 32.5k, 60k, and 100k XP.
Naturally. Instead, the tiers need to be equivalent to the Starbase because that's what the developers wanted to create.
Naturally. Instead, the tiers need to be equivalent to the Starbase because that's what the developers wanted to create.
^This
I also find it funny there is so much complaining when, before the colony was announced, I recall many people not only asking for a colony fleet holding, but asking for one that was a bigger sink then he Starbase BECAUSE it was a colony.
But this just seems like the queue UI situation all over again. Cryptic does a point by point wishlist of what people wanted, and then they complain they got everything they asked for.
Right, as soon as people learned they were going to have multiple holdings, a colony has been at the top of the wishlist.
But no, it's not like the queue UI situation at all. Not only did nobody ever ask them to complicate the UI, reduce available information, raise minimum player limits, add cancellation spam, surprise warp-outs, prevent running solo private queues, etc, but the colony is easily ignored by those players/fleets who don't want to build one whereas the queue UI can't practically be avoided without quitting the game completely.
Seven can do it in a day if they don't need it for anything else.
'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.'
As a small family fleet owner with no desired to expand its membership, the colony holding for now spells the end of my interest in completing Fleet projects.
We did rather well, Level 71 when the next tier 2 colony project completes later this week. I may take one section to tier 3, but the costs and effort required are too much to continue given that it provides nothing that I want (outside completed fleet holdings).
This comes at a bad time too, as I have little reason to log in right now outside of the Fleet Holdings. My main is maxed (or rather, as maxed as I want to be due to the fact that I want canon TOS style ships and characters).
I hope the next expansion is impressive as I think the colony is a dud. Marvel Heroes Online (the other MMO I played) is shutting down because they didn't keep the game growing. I see many of the same patterns here as well.
As a small family fleet owner with no desired to expand its membership, the colony holding for now spells the end of my interest in completing Fleet projects.
We did rather well, Level 71 when the next tier 2 colony project completes later this week. I may take one section to tier 3, but the costs and effort required are too much to continue given that it provides nothing that I want (outside completed fleet holdings).
This comes at a bad time too, as I have little reason to log in right now outside of the Fleet Holdings. My main is maxed (or rather, as maxed as I want to be due to the fact that I want canon TOS style ships and characters).
I hope the next expansion is impressive as I think the colony is a dud. Marvel Heroes Online (the other MMO I played) is shutting down because they didn't keep the game growing. I see many of the same patterns here as well.
Good post. We have a few small fleets in our armada as well who’s so far efforts to expand their holdings have been admirable. It’s saddening how cryptic suddenly changes rules for fleet costs and now tries to go after those who directed themselves the most for fleets just to see how much more they can squeeze out of them.
Makes me really shake my head how some poster around here underline how it was the community wishing for a colony expansion. Yea sure, some did, but I don’t recall anybody asking for it to costs 80 Mil Dil.
We had multiple expansions to fleet holdings so far and the respective cost were always roughly fixed so peeps could decide easily if it is feasible to make a fleet or if it’s too much of an effort. Fleets did their part to sink Dil for the market’s interest. Asking for this undertaking to manage however remains absurd and I’m relatively sure that it won’t have the wished for results for the market; not if more fleet leaders show the same reaction as the person I quoted did. And there are already quite a few who do for that matter.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
One part of the issue is Cryptic wavering with it's target audience.
As a F2P game, it depends on people with more money than patience paying through the nose for the chance to NOT play it. That means elements that take significant ingame time and/or effort, but can be skipped with cash. Anything that costs dilithium is pretty much spot on here.
On the other hand, nobody wants to be in an empty MMO and there aren't enough "whales" to fill one, so to balance that a F2P game needs free players that are willing to play through it the hard way. Unfortunately, Cryptic has been systematically pushing away players like that, by constantly making things easier, faster and IMO, boring.
Since they need stuff people will pay for, they can't make EVERYTHING easy and fast and cheap. They could have the difficulty and/or cost be distributed across the game or they can have mostly Easy Mode except a few things that go through the roof. Some players have constantly demanded more Easy Mode and Cryptic has chosen to go with them, so there you have it.
I'm not at all surprised that the kind of players who cheer everytime a reason to play the game is removed (most recently, account-unlocking the MI reward) would complain about the cost of things like the colony, the lockboxes, etc. But those things are not going anywhere because the game's existence depends on them.
I'm not at all surprised that the kind of players who cheer everytime a reason to play the game is removed (most recently, account-unlocking the MI reward) would complain about the cost of things like the colony, the lockboxes, etc. But those things are not going anywhere because the game's existence depends on them.
The MI rewards have been more than underwhelming and the mission is awful due to its design. I've stopped playing it as a result and I'm sure others have too. That Cryptic thought changing the reward to be an account unlock would fix this was just their typical least effort attempt to counter that decision. For me, it didn't work.
And as a person who took his Fleet to Level 71, the colony is now also a no-go. I hope cryptic gets what they want from the Fleet Whales, because they just lost my type of player for that subsystem. Go Cryptic. Hope that works out for you.
One good solution to the cost would be to have fleet only dilithium vouchers as part of the reward for the colony simulation. That way players are still playing the content to get the rewards, metrics are still filled up and fleets can still stand a chance at developing reasonably quickly rather than being stuck in oblivion. This would allow players in fleets to either play the content and populate the ground queues or pay to speed things up with zen-dil conversion.
One good solution to the cost would be to have fleet only dilithium vouchers as part of the reward for the colony simulation.
That way players are still playing the content to get the rewards, metrics are still filled up and fleets can still stand a chance at developing reasonably quickly rather than being stuck in oblivion.
This would allow players in fleets to either play the content and populate the ground queues or pay to speed things up with zen-dil conversion.
That’s a pretty good idea I could easily live with. I could have also lived with the decision to switch the requirements for the daily XP projects (only) from refined Dil to Dil ore. Both would have worked out as a huge incentive to play the new content while not passing on the pressure of lowering the Dil exchange rates onto those players who keep it low over year’s long contributions anyway.
For the latter this game needs sinks like the phoenix box where the full spectrum of players is addressed instead of giving the majority the option to simply not mind about it.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
I dont care much about Dilithium but higher tier fleets do have to come up with huge amounts of colony provisions when trying to update a tier.
Is there a channel that I can use to solicit anyone to trade in colony provisions in lieu of EC?
I'm willing to trade up to 1MIL EC for 1000 colony provisions. The SIM channel helps but only gives so much that we need over 50 times that amount of provisions to upgrade to next level and we are not even at level 4.
I doubt people will pay for provisions now tbh, not seeing as once you get going with auto collect plus the simulation the fleet coffers are literally swimming in the darned things. I mean the coffee system means anyone can contribute even when no project is slotted which means fleet credits are no longer locked out behind a restrictive project system. The whole thing is wide open to be farmed to your heart’s content and it’s desinged that way. So provisions I don’t think are the issue, maybe they were when all we had was measly farming games but no longer.
But I’d seriously hope some sort of improvement to the dilithium requirement would be considered. That’s a big price for even the most active fleets to pay to get the full holding.
Yeah...for me it's the other way around. We just got an upgrade to T4 and for the life of me I cannot understand why people dont have DIL. This is so easy to farm and I know there is a time gate to convert to usable dilithium.
Our fleet don't have issues with Dilithium YET but this new T4 upgrade is about 50K in colony provisions per category. I know you can grind those from the SIM channel at about 2.5K per 30 waves....that would give you about 20 events per person. That's a lot of grinding for the sim and really very tiring and boring to do that much. I rather pay someone for provisions but I guess you can do the same with dilithium.
Heck it wasn't my idea but heard from a ferengui who wanted to make some profits out of provisions.
Colony Sim will pay out 2100 of each provision for a full 30 round mission. And it takes about 30-45 mins with a good group of 20 players, plus it has no cooldown.
At least with the Simulation Channel you can nearly always find a person hosting so if fleet members were wanting to farm the hell out of it they could do so.
Comments
When they gave us the Embassy, the blog for it mentioned "smaller holdings" but then went on to give those a category name that I don't think that we ever heard again, Outposts. The Colony is obviously not an Outpost, it's a larger holding, like the Starbase.
End rant about weird categorical error.
Replacing everything with dilithium is precisely what's been killing this game since DR. Rewards and costs must be sufficiently differentiated for there to be a reason to engage in diverse gameplay instead of dumb grinding of the Best Rewarding Content. Personally, I preferred the original holding cost model, that included rare consumables, equipment items and type-specific non-white doffs. And when fleet marks required specific missions to gain instead of coming up everywhere for free.
The provision model for the colony is certainly better than the pointlessly complicated fleet credit sink of the previous ones, but replacing most of the requirements with dilithium negated much of the effect.
I have to agree with you here.
The original methods at least had varied means of supporting the starbase system so that it wasn't just one massive grind for dilithium like it is now. All sorts of players could contribute as they all had different resources to apply to the projects. Some farmed doffs and dumped spare whites into the SB. Others were commodity traders who would get the best deals via Ferengi dealers or freighters. And you had to run actual fleet missions to get flarks as well which populated those queues.
The colony was a nice change with the mining of provision and also with the simulation to get tonnes of them for everyone. But swapping most to dilithium was a poor move and has resulted in the same holding stagnation you saw in the past. Bigger fleets like my own will survive this, those smaller and with less active players/armadas will loose out and exhaust themselves.
Just because it is a five Tier HOLDING does not mean that each of the Tiers needs to be the equivalent XP-wise to the Starbase. Instead of jumping up to 250k XP for each of the Sub-Holdings they could have approached it like Reputation Tiers. That is 5k, 15k, 32.5k, 60k, and 100k XP.
You do know that we are HELPING the Lukari/Kentari NOT doing this all on our own.
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.'
But no, it's not like the queue UI situation at all. Not only did nobody ever ask them to complicate the UI, reduce available information, raise minimum player limits, add cancellation spam, surprise warp-outs, prevent running solo private queues, etc, but the colony is easily ignored by those players/fleets who don't want to build one whereas the queue UI can't practically be avoided without quitting the game completely.
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.'
True. The challenge is in getting 25 people to do that.
We did rather well, Level 71 when the next tier 2 colony project completes later this week. I may take one section to tier 3, but the costs and effort required are too much to continue given that it provides nothing that I want (outside completed fleet holdings).
This comes at a bad time too, as I have little reason to log in right now outside of the Fleet Holdings. My main is maxed (or rather, as maxed as I want to be due to the fact that I want canon TOS style ships and characters).
I hope the next expansion is impressive as I think the colony is a dud. Marvel Heroes Online (the other MMO I played) is shutting down because they didn't keep the game growing. I see many of the same patterns here as well.
Good post. We have a few small fleets in our armada as well who’s so far efforts to expand their holdings have been admirable. It’s saddening how cryptic suddenly changes rules for fleet costs and now tries to go after those who directed themselves the most for fleets just to see how much more they can squeeze out of them.
Makes me really shake my head how some poster around here underline how it was the community wishing for a colony expansion. Yea sure, some did, but I don’t recall anybody asking for it to costs 80 Mil Dil.
We had multiple expansions to fleet holdings so far and the respective cost were always roughly fixed so peeps could decide easily if it is feasible to make a fleet or if it’s too much of an effort. Fleets did their part to sink Dil for the market’s interest. Asking for this undertaking to manage however remains absurd and I’m relatively sure that it won’t have the wished for results for the market; not if more fleet leaders show the same reaction as the person I quoted did. And there are already quite a few who do for that matter.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
As a F2P game, it depends on people with more money than patience paying through the nose for the chance to NOT play it. That means elements that take significant ingame time and/or effort, but can be skipped with cash. Anything that costs dilithium is pretty much spot on here.
On the other hand, nobody wants to be in an empty MMO and there aren't enough "whales" to fill one, so to balance that a F2P game needs free players that are willing to play through it the hard way. Unfortunately, Cryptic has been systematically pushing away players like that, by constantly making things easier, faster and IMO, boring.
Since they need stuff people will pay for, they can't make EVERYTHING easy and fast and cheap. They could have the difficulty and/or cost be distributed across the game or they can have mostly Easy Mode except a few things that go through the roof. Some players have constantly demanded more Easy Mode and Cryptic has chosen to go with them, so there you have it.
I'm not at all surprised that the kind of players who cheer everytime a reason to play the game is removed (most recently, account-unlocking the MI reward) would complain about the cost of things like the colony, the lockboxes, etc. But those things are not going anywhere because the game's existence depends on them.
Lol, with my fleet we closed water, electricity and gas
The MI rewards have been more than underwhelming and the mission is awful due to its design. I've stopped playing it as a result and I'm sure others have too. That Cryptic thought changing the reward to be an account unlock would fix this was just their typical least effort attempt to counter that decision. For me, it didn't work.
And as a person who took his Fleet to Level 71, the colony is now also a no-go. I hope cryptic gets what they want from the Fleet Whales, because they just lost my type of player for that subsystem. Go Cryptic. Hope that works out for you.
Street Lights, for a game system that doesn't have day/night cycle.
Injury, meet insult.
That way players are still playing the content to get the rewards, metrics are still filled up and fleets can still stand a chance at developing reasonably quickly rather than being stuck in oblivion.
This would allow players in fleets to either play the content and populate the ground queues or pay to speed things up with zen-dil conversion.
That’s a pretty good idea I could easily live with. I could have also lived with the decision to switch the requirements for the daily XP projects (only) from refined Dil to Dil ore. Both would have worked out as a huge incentive to play the new content while not passing on the pressure of lowering the Dil exchange rates onto those players who keep it low over year’s long contributions anyway.
For the latter this game needs sinks like the phoenix box where the full spectrum of players is addressed instead of giving the majority the option to simply not mind about it.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Is there a channel that I can use to solicit anyone to trade in colony provisions in lieu of EC?
I'm willing to trade up to 1MIL EC for 1000 colony provisions. The SIM channel helps but only gives so much that we need over 50 times that amount of provisions to upgrade to next level and we are not even at level 4.
I mean the coffee system means anyone can contribute even when no project is slotted which means fleet credits are no longer locked out behind a restrictive project system. The whole thing is wide open to be farmed to your heart’s content and it’s desinged that way. So provisions I don’t think are the issue, maybe they were when all we had was measly farming games but no longer.
But I’d seriously hope some sort of improvement to the dilithium requirement would be considered. That’s a big price for even the most active fleets to pay to get the full holding.
Our fleet don't have issues with Dilithium YET but this new T4 upgrade is about 50K in colony provisions per category. I know you can grind those from the SIM channel at about 2.5K per 30 waves....that would give you about 20 events per person. That's a lot of grinding for the sim and really very tiring and boring to do that much. I rather pay someone for provisions but I guess you can do the same with dilithium.
Heck it wasn't my idea but heard from a ferengui who wanted to make some profits out of provisions.
At least with the Simulation Channel you can nearly always find a person hosting so if fleet members were wanting to farm the hell out of it they could do so.