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After putting almost 2000 hours into this game, I have some general feedback on reoccurring issues.
austin2115
Member Posts: 3 Arc User
To get this out of the way now, 2000 hours is probably only a fraction of some of the long time players. However I still consider it long enough to have a well informed opinion on the state of the game and the numerous petty frustrations and issues that have lead to me leaving the game on several occasions.
So the first issue I think could be addressed with no negative impact is to make the game more alt friendly. It boggles my mind that a game that encourages buying $120 ship packs just to cover all factions makes it such a pain to actually want to play those factions. Other than Feds historically getting the lions share of all content releases, making a new character is just not worth the time it takes to drag yourself through the same missions you already played through multiple times before. I really like 90% of all the missions the first time I played through them. I still liked about 40% of them the second time I played through them. By the third time I was wondering why I was even playing this game when I'm not even having fun. On top of all that, if you want any of the mission reward sets you have to play through those missions AGAIN on the SAME CHARACTER. Countless times I would get an idea for a character, but then lose absolutely all enthusiasm and desire to even play the game about 10-15 missions in to this new character. Character will sit in limbo for a while until I either bored myself to death getting it to max level and through all the missions or I just delete it completely. I don't even understand why. Does it hurt Cryptic in anyway for players to get more characters to end game as fast as possible? Seems to me like all money invested into a character happens AFTER level 60, not before. You should be wanting people to get to that stage as soon as possible. Instead you make it such a painful chore that people just setup farming characters, which DO affect your income because they ease the grind. We get Dilithium Sinks like the Phoenix Box and fleet holdings, but I promise you the best Dilithium sink of all is a new character the player is excited to get geared up. Painful mission replays completely kill this excitement.
Well here's the good part about this issue: The first fix is just a bug fix. Please get your skip mission button working consistently. For some reason you can skip missions and then it just stops working and you have to back-track across missions until you finally find where it got hung up and play through that mission so you can skip again. Make it simple and just let players play ANY mission they meet the level requirement for.
Another fix to this issue is to reward players with R&D projects to build mission sets all at once. Having to play a mission three times(with a half-hour cooldown between) is just a useless pain. What do you accomplish by making players play through the same mission again and again? Why do you force them to wait between play throughs? Why would you take something as simple and basic as a mission reward item set and make the grind to get it such a pain? I'm no game dev, but it seems to me that any system that turns your game into a teeth gritting chore is probably a bad system to have in your game. Give players a fully built item, allow them to craft the others. This also has the added benefit of promoting your R&D system more. Make the crafted versions account-bound. Getting that mission reward gear faster will keep a players momentum and excitement in a new character going and that can only lead to wanting to get Cstore ships or exclusive items for this character. Yes this would allow players to have and end-game character that never did a single story mission. But honestly, do you care more about showing off your mission design to someone who has already seen it, or making extra money off of a players newest resource sink?
Speaking of resource sinks.... I understand why this game needs them but MOTHER OF GOD can you tone it down just a little bit? Specifically when it comes to reputation items. Everything about the reputation system feels like it is designed to create moments where the grind ahead is so large I just want to stop playing the game or bitterly hand over some cash. If every transaction a player makes is laced with bitterness and regret... they will stop playing your game the minute their patience runs out. Again, not a game dev... but this seems like bad practice. The worst part is that, at least in my case, this system isn't even working on me. I have several reputation item projects slotting on several characters I have no interest or desire of completing because I simply don't feel like I'm getting any real value for the amount of Dilithium you are expecting me to cough up. I would rather just do without the item instead of grinding/paying for it. Not a game dev, but a player that doesn't even want to engage in your end-game content seems like a failure. You want more players spending Dilithium? Make reputation items more attractive. I think cutting prices in half across the board would just about do it. 32,500 dilithium looks and FEELS like a hefty purchase. That is 3-4 DAYS of grinding. 15,000 is still a high number but it FEELS much more comfortable. Instead of thinking: "Will I play this game for almost a week just for that ONE item?" players are more likely to think: "Hey, I can get this item if I just play tomorrow". I assume you want players to spend their Dilithium without thinking about it too much, and spreading it out over multiple smaller purchases is more likely to do that than having several big purchases.
This is getting to be a long post, so here is a really quick list of a few other issues:
Not being able to directly claim Admiralty cards I own the ship for. This won't make me buy ship slots, it just feels like a chore.
Doffs not always being rewarded in the stack-able packs. This won't make be buy Doff slots, it's just a pain.
SO MUCH CLICKING. Between Admiralty, Reputation Daily/hourly projects, and fleet projects. It is just insane how much time is spent clicking. Auto-fill admiralty, get rid of the Department Heads Doff section and just show all assignments available in one sort-able window, and Auto-fill queued reputation projects(meaning you have them slotting behind an active one), all would be great steps towards this.
Final thoughts: I apologize for any Typos/grammar mistakes. If anything isn't completely clear I would be happy to expand on any issue above more.
EDIT: I appreciate all the feedback, and I can certainly see the different aspects of things like Alts and reputation items.
So the first issue I think could be addressed with no negative impact is to make the game more alt friendly. It boggles my mind that a game that encourages buying $120 ship packs just to cover all factions makes it such a pain to actually want to play those factions. Other than Feds historically getting the lions share of all content releases, making a new character is just not worth the time it takes to drag yourself through the same missions you already played through multiple times before. I really like 90% of all the missions the first time I played through them. I still liked about 40% of them the second time I played through them. By the third time I was wondering why I was even playing this game when I'm not even having fun. On top of all that, if you want any of the mission reward sets you have to play through those missions AGAIN on the SAME CHARACTER. Countless times I would get an idea for a character, but then lose absolutely all enthusiasm and desire to even play the game about 10-15 missions in to this new character. Character will sit in limbo for a while until I either bored myself to death getting it to max level and through all the missions or I just delete it completely. I don't even understand why. Does it hurt Cryptic in anyway for players to get more characters to end game as fast as possible? Seems to me like all money invested into a character happens AFTER level 60, not before. You should be wanting people to get to that stage as soon as possible. Instead you make it such a painful chore that people just setup farming characters, which DO affect your income because they ease the grind. We get Dilithium Sinks like the Phoenix Box and fleet holdings, but I promise you the best Dilithium sink of all is a new character the player is excited to get geared up. Painful mission replays completely kill this excitement.
Well here's the good part about this issue: The first fix is just a bug fix. Please get your skip mission button working consistently. For some reason you can skip missions and then it just stops working and you have to back-track across missions until you finally find where it got hung up and play through that mission so you can skip again. Make it simple and just let players play ANY mission they meet the level requirement for.
Another fix to this issue is to reward players with R&D projects to build mission sets all at once. Having to play a mission three times(with a half-hour cooldown between) is just a useless pain. What do you accomplish by making players play through the same mission again and again? Why do you force them to wait between play throughs? Why would you take something as simple and basic as a mission reward item set and make the grind to get it such a pain? I'm no game dev, but it seems to me that any system that turns your game into a teeth gritting chore is probably a bad system to have in your game. Give players a fully built item, allow them to craft the others. This also has the added benefit of promoting your R&D system more. Make the crafted versions account-bound. Getting that mission reward gear faster will keep a players momentum and excitement in a new character going and that can only lead to wanting to get Cstore ships or exclusive items for this character. Yes this would allow players to have and end-game character that never did a single story mission. But honestly, do you care more about showing off your mission design to someone who has already seen it, or making extra money off of a players newest resource sink?
Speaking of resource sinks.... I understand why this game needs them but MOTHER OF GOD can you tone it down just a little bit? Specifically when it comes to reputation items. Everything about the reputation system feels like it is designed to create moments where the grind ahead is so large I just want to stop playing the game or bitterly hand over some cash. If every transaction a player makes is laced with bitterness and regret... they will stop playing your game the minute their patience runs out. Again, not a game dev... but this seems like bad practice. The worst part is that, at least in my case, this system isn't even working on me. I have several reputation item projects slotting on several characters I have no interest or desire of completing because I simply don't feel like I'm getting any real value for the amount of Dilithium you are expecting me to cough up. I would rather just do without the item instead of grinding/paying for it. Not a game dev, but a player that doesn't even want to engage in your end-game content seems like a failure. You want more players spending Dilithium? Make reputation items more attractive. I think cutting prices in half across the board would just about do it. 32,500 dilithium looks and FEELS like a hefty purchase. That is 3-4 DAYS of grinding. 15,000 is still a high number but it FEELS much more comfortable. Instead of thinking: "Will I play this game for almost a week just for that ONE item?" players are more likely to think: "Hey, I can get this item if I just play tomorrow". I assume you want players to spend their Dilithium without thinking about it too much, and spreading it out over multiple smaller purchases is more likely to do that than having several big purchases.
This is getting to be a long post, so here is a really quick list of a few other issues:
Not being able to directly claim Admiralty cards I own the ship for. This won't make me buy ship slots, it just feels like a chore.
Doffs not always being rewarded in the stack-able packs. This won't make be buy Doff slots, it's just a pain.
SO MUCH CLICKING. Between Admiralty, Reputation Daily/hourly projects, and fleet projects. It is just insane how much time is spent clicking. Auto-fill admiralty, get rid of the Department Heads Doff section and just show all assignments available in one sort-able window, and Auto-fill queued reputation projects(meaning you have them slotting behind an active one), all would be great steps towards this.
Final thoughts: I apologize for any Typos/grammar mistakes. If anything isn't completely clear I would be happy to expand on any issue above more.
EDIT: I appreciate all the feedback, and I can certainly see the different aspects of things like Alts and reputation items.
Post edited by austin2115 on
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Wow... you mean to tell me that in all of gaming history there has literally only been two kinds of reward systems? 15 days worth of grind, or .01% drop rates? Well I learn something new every day.
Firstly, let's dispel the 'Feds get all the content myth'....they don't! Roms have more missions period. Here's a link to the breakdown of content per faction.
https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/1237664/ships-and-episodes-per-faction
Second, this game is so alt friendly, it's unbelievable. And how long does it take to level an alt, with some gameplay, 28 hours it took my AoY toon...TWENTY EIGHT HOURS (That's seven days at 4 hours a session)! Add to that the Rep boosters you get from the toons already maxed, AND the fact you can transfer EC, Dil, Doff's, Boff's and Items between characters! And not to mention C-Store and Event ships that are ACCOUNT UNLOCKS, plus the massive resource boosts that come from completing Rep and Admiralty on those toons!!
Third. Why, in my opinion, missions have cooldowns. Two reasons, to stop players 'exploiting' large rewarding missions and to deter botting said missions. However, I do agree to a point about replaying missions on alt toons to get the sets, it can be a drag, but I do tend to do missions with large ship numbers to farm EC from drops.
Fourth. Reputation items are supposed to be HIGH VALUE and HARD TO ATTAIN, as per what the original Omega Salvage was prior to the Rep system. The costs are not actually that high. To be honest, I think that it's too easy to attain Rep Items, but it's too late in the day to change back to the old system where you had to collect salvage to build your Omega sets. But I will tell you this, from a psychological point of view, the higher the value an item someone works for, the higher the level of sense of achievement when one gets it. What you propose OP is way, way too cheap.
Fifth. To a point, I agree, there's alot more clicky these days, but the rewards are greater than they have ever been.
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
with a little doff invesment in very and ultra rare doffs. levl. 13-60 is 4 hours ..
https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1238479/tipp-research-assignment-and-doffing
playing in teams make the missions more fun ...
https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/1234922/team-play-missions-need-to-know
it's intended. but i agree. i would suggest that, all the replays could be made skippable with some dilit cost.
don't feel the need to do all the reps on each toon!!
agree 100%
The amount of dils needed for projects are good tho.
It's not much of a problem when you only have a few ships, but is downright painful to deal with for every character when you have 70-80 ships on a single faction.
Be glad the OP used paragraphs, there are times when they (the OPers) don't use paragraphs and the wall of text is more visible. Also, some people are eloquent in how they express their concerns and supposed problems with the game they are playing. There is nothing wrong with that. Thanks.
and that's the way it was in STO. thank GOD the devs realised that and got rid of it.
If it makes you feel better last time I looked I had almost 4400 hours on my main toon alone, not counting my other toons. Of course that's over an almost 5-6 year period now. So you're not alone in terms of sinking more time into the game than you might want to admit lols.
With this said this is one of the most alt friendly games out there today with all the ways you have to get to max level and all the items you can potentially call on along the way. All Cstore ships and many of the cstore items themselves are account unlocks. In my case the last big ship pack I bought were the Miracle Worker ships for $120. I currently have 20 characters at level 60 which I have gotten there over the years. Assuming each character claims all 3 ships for their faction, that means I've essentially came into possession of 60 ships across all of those toons. At this point in the game there's very little from the cstore in terms of t5 and t6 ships that I don't own. This means that each of my toons has a literal personal fleet of ships to pick from at max level they could potentially fly. They also have a virtual armory of items and consoles to pick from also taking into account the t4 ships and below that sometimes have great consoles and/or weapons. Very few games allow you to have that massive of a head start on a newer character. I agree some of the missions get boring after awhile and there's honestly a mission or two I would love to remove if given the chance just because I don't like them. However you don't need to play through the missions just to get to max level. Try getting the character to max level then using some of the Temporal or other duty officer assignments you can get from the lockboxes or off the exchange. With very few of those, and fewer still on XP weekends you can get a toon to 60 in less than 24 hours. If you level too fast in a game then you would blaze through all content and have nothing to do. In STO we have the foundry which is a great stop gap measure until more official stories come out. As the saying goes, grind smarter, not harder.
When it comes to skipping missions, that's not a bug as certain missions are unskippable for various reasons. That reason could be due to an unlock in the story it gives or something else entirely. We can debate as to whether or not they should skippable or not, but this has been a thing for years that I don't see going anywhere anytime soon. Still for the most part you can skip 90% of the story missions if you want. Not many games out there today allow you to do that without there being some kind of special reason/mechanic. When I come to one of those missions I just put on some music and let my brain drift elsewhere until the mission is over.
I can tell you one reason why there are cooldowns on various missions, patrols etc now and that's bots. Almost all mmos have more than one means of acquiring gear and STO is no exception to the rule. This is part of why the free sets are there, to give people something use as a free option. It allows people access to set pieces without having to craft or sink massive amounts of resources into the game. Assuming it's a full blown set of gear like the Sol Defense set as one example, it would most likely follow the example of the Aegis crafted set. In which case you're looking at 20 hours to craft for each piece of gear, and for a full 4 piece set you're looking at nearly 4 days vs the 2-3 hours we have now. I also don't see them ever letting people move reputation or mission reward items like that as account bound. It's one thing to move a crafted weapon, but another thing entirely to move something like a mission reward set.
You only need to do the full blown reputation grind once on any single character, then you can move sponsorship tokens through your account bank which allow you to complete said reputation in half the time it was prior. You also are not required to complete any of the reputations either. If you wanted to do so, you could never touch reputation items and gear and still do well enough to clear 99% of the content in this game with no issue.
As to resource sinks, dilithium sinks are created to remove excess dilithium from the game. There have been a few times in the history of the game where the dilithium exchange has hit or come close to hitting the 500 dilithium to zen limit. When it did happen it was a miserable time had by all save possibly for the zen sellers. You want a healthy balance so that free to play players can still acquire zen, and sellers get a decent amount of dilithium as well. My ideal balance is around 225-300 dilithium per zen. I agree sometimes resource sinks can get tedious but the alternative to not having them is much worse as those resource sinks are what keeps the dilithium exchange in check. You can also refine 8,000 dilithium per character per day. In my case if I hit the 8k limit on each of my toons, that's 160k dilithium I can rake in per day, and there are multiple ways to get dilithium in this game that require little to no effort. Most marks out there also have multiple sources they can drop from and many have dedicated battlezones that you can spam missions in to get as many marks as you can hold or that you want. As I said prior grind smarter not harder. As for me personally I don't see those transactions as being laced with bitterness or regret at all. In fact I see them as my work paying off for having helped out said faction I've gained reputation with. I wouldn't expect them to just hand me the items for free and as far as I'm concerned it's a fair trade. We can certainly debate that but I don't see it as being a big deal. In the grand scheme of things 32,500 dilithium isn't much when getting a ship up and running for the first time, even if you do it across 4 pieces.
I absolutely agree here that I wish we could just have our admiralty cards rewarded to us for each ship we own once we hit 52, even if we don't have that ship actively claimed, but just unlocked. As far as auto-filling everything that much I don't agree with. part of the point of doffing is that you're supposed to be giving their assignments as their captain. Being a captain comes with its responsibilities. Overall while I can understand some stuff being frustrating, there are already solutions to most of your issues that I can see in game. Just my 2 cents in this pile anyways.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
I admit I skipped replaying Coliseum for the nth time on my new Andorian captain Greye, but other than that light being too bright I enjoying playing through the TOS stories and the shared Fed stories again with a new captain and crew.
It helped that Cryptic has made little improvements to the shared Fed content like adding voice work by LeVar Burton and Scotty's son.
Leveling reps isn't too bad with a combination of sponsorship tokens and red alerts for marks plus earning some ship mastery traits at the same time. One 6 minute alert covers 2 days for a rep plus gives you dil and either EC or salvage from drops.
I'm saving up for a Crossfield myself. Unfortunately I'm also saving Zen for another project, so my EC income is... er... not as good.
So what's your alternative? You don't want to pay for it. You don't want to grind for it. WHAT is the alternative?
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.'
Roms have more missions and level very quickly. An AoY character also levels rather quickly. I like the KDF more than anything else and I started a new character last week. I got to level 43 in my Reman in just a little under 3 days. My Nausicaan just reached level 14 this morning after having spent the same time in game. The Reputation system is kinda generous now but you still have to use a lot of dilithium to get anything. In the old days you had to play STF's to get components for your end game gear. As a KDF it was not fun at all because back then there were no cross faction STF's so it took forever to get a group going and then you had to hope that you would be lucky and would the much desired component you needed. I never managed to get full space and ground sets until after they were moved to the Reputation tabs. But to say that the game is alt friendly is not true. It would cost a fortune to make a new char and get him fully geared as my KDF tac. I don't have the time of the patience to do so all over again. I love my science and engineer characters but I just don't have the time to make them as good as my main. They are just pale copies.
In the end, if some content's rewards reach too high degree of saturation they could always add new drops, or new uses for the existing ones.
And it isn't a bad thing that players would switch to different content after getting enough drops from one. The game has a lot of content and all of it needs a reason to play. When done right, there's always something to play that you want. If you got everything from content X, you go play Y next while some other player does the reverse. You'd come back to X if you needed more stuff from it. What is bad is all the content rewarding the same thing, making most of it never worth playing in the first place.
If we leave the feeling aside that this is a "I want it now, I don't care about anything else" attitude, there are a few things that arise from your feedback session.
1. The skipping of missions should be done consistently. Some mandatory missions can become a nuisance, limiting the freedom that this Star Trek ideas was built upon.
2. Some reputation items should have some reductions applied to their dilithium cost - only for secondary toons, after receiving the Sponsorship token on that reputation. There are some reputation items locked almost out due to the unavailability of the community of playing the content itself. (Lukari and Competitive are especially in this lane).
3. A faction-related boost in exp could help in minimizing the overall tedious experience. For example, if your alt is a FED toon and you've reached 60 already with another FED toon, the exp boost for up to level 60 should be enabled on all other FED toons created on that account. Same applying to KDF and ROM toons as well. Would really help both diversity and toon leveling up.
Keep in mind that this game and community is a very good free to play environment. Its leveling concept is entertaining, chaining, engaging and fast compared to any other mmos. You become relevant way faster in pve here than anywhere else.
Also keep in mind that any game must have its hard to get and constant carrot-on-a-stick to keep players on playing the content and engaging in. That is entertaining.
And also, to be honest, as long as the pay-options aren't predatory and the game can be enjoyed fully without spending a single-dime... This is an amazingly well implemented freemium (free to play but better as a premium) game. I'd totally advertise the idea of adding more rewards for gold subs and maybe some zen tracker that rewards users based on their zen consumption (zen can be made with dil, so that would help a free user into accessing some hefty rewards in time without opening the wallet).
Hope this was useful and looking forward to see you side by side to us as we trek out into the quandrant sunset (lol).