Gamma Quadrant Battlezone

nommo

https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/10887104

I have to admit I had to look-up the word: abeyance.

rattler2

My guess... Abeyance has something to do with a lessening of something. Or something along those lines.

Although I did note something else in the blog.

Gamma Marks.

*polishes up the ol' Advanced Radiant Quantum Torpedos*

Bring it on!

szim

So the gamma quadrant battlezone is a series of Red Alerts which then trigger the final attack on the Founders' homeworld. I wonder about the actual tasks. Is it just going to be a warp-in/pew pew/warp-out scenario or will there be more to it?

shadowfirefly00

szim wrote: »

So the gamma quadrant battlezone is a series of Red Alerts which then trigger the final attack on the Founders' homeworld.

Less Red Alerts than strains of Deep Space Encounters, but your reading of it does appear to be correct.

I wonder about the actual tasks. Is it just going to be a warp-in/pew pew/warp-out scenario or will there be more to it?

Hopefully the latter - there're quite a few possible taskings that could be incorporated here. Planetary defense (similar to the Tzenkethi RA), convoy rescue (see: Na'kuhl RA), and strikes on the Hur'q logistical 'tail' (Na'kuhl RA, in reverse) come readily to mind. Such diversity also makes room for bonus objectives for folks to work towards (i.e. keeping both platforms operational in the Tzenkethi RA) and even random complications which can themselves offer bonuses for completing the op in spite of them (example: there's a chance of a Hur'q 'ace squadron' popping into one of these ops).

I would also posit that the existing DSEs could only benefit from such diversification...

bossheisenberg

szim wrote: »

So the gamma quadrant battlezone is a series of Red Alerts which then trigger the final attack on the Founders' homeworld. I wonder about the actual tasks. Is it just going to be a warp-in/pew pew/warp-out scenario or will there be more to it?

You know it will be pew pew pew.

dracounguis

Sounds suspiciously like a rehash of the Borg invasion event.

tomgonjinn23

I wonder how random the stuff is going to be or if fit is going to be as noted earlier just red alerts until a big fight. Hopefully the attack of the founder homeworld is a large fight as well as it would be disappointing if it was too easy. Maybe like each system in the Quadrant that's on the sector map has its own Hurq attack and each planet has its own special changes to the mission type like maybe an evac or something to change things up.

szim

I imagine the final attack on the Founders' homeworld to be somewhat like the defense of New Romulus against the Elachi from the Romulan story arc. With multiple defense lines and NPC support and maybe even a ground portion. The final battle taking place on the Founders' planet. It would be nice to have a mixed space/ground "queue" again.

spacehermit

Gamma Marks? Another reputation then.

asuran14

I actually quite like the idea of this. That the main battlezone might only be active at the end via the founder's home world, but the entire gamma quad is a sort of semi-red alert/deep space/battlezone. In that you get alerts to go to specific areas int he quad to deal with different things happening is quite like a deep space/red alert, while the clearing of each of these is quite like a battlezone in that you need to progress thru the other operations to open the final operation. I am just hoping that they have more than a handful of different operations that pop, the more variety in them the better the replay an less chance of it getting stale fast.

postagepaid

szim wrote: »

So the gamma quadrant battlezone is a series of Red Alerts which then trigger the final attack on the Founders' homeworld. I wonder about the actual tasks. Is it just going to be a warp-in/pew pew/warp-out scenario or will there be more to it?

Mix of the deep space encounters, patrols and the old style RA needing chased down was what I read into it.

Almost certainly involving mindless pewpewpew since thats how cryptic want us to play.

Sounds like this could simply be a reworking of delta grinding where they don't force umpteen patrols into the story but instead have them plastered across the map.

smooshy

It sounds like the whole quadrant is the battlezone, yes? Just as long as it's better than Gonna Cry.

tigeraries

spacehermit wrote: »

Gamma Marks? Another reputation then.

I am shocked! shocked I say!

rattler2

spacehermit wrote: »

Gamma Marks? Another reputation then.

Hopefully Polaron themed... allowing us to get canon looking Dominion Polaron.

lordsteve1

I'm all in favour of some sort of persistent warzone but this feels a bit of a wet noodle i must admit. It seems to be a combo of red alerts, deep space encounters and the queue system, which i'm a little bit hesitant to get excited about.
We saw how the Tzenkethi BZ turned out and then was neglected. We saw how broken the Voth BZ has become. We saw the stupid high respawn rate in the Kobali BZ. I dread to think how badly a whole sector could be messed up if things go wrong.

warpangel

The rewards are the same as always.

I predict yet another content quickly consigned to the forgotten bin as people grab what marks they need from the borg alert and go back to the best source of dil.

questerius

What are the odds that this new battlezone will be delivered without enough bugs to make the zone unplayable.

starkaos

Is anyone else thinking we might finally get a reputation with a Battlezone that has no Elite Marks? The worst part about Tzenkethi was trying to get the Protomatter Microcontainers. Especially when you help take down all 3 dreadnoughts and they weren't awarded or when you get 8/9 zones captured and in a couple of minutes it goes down to 1/9.

shadowfirefly00

lordsteve1 wrote: »

We saw how the Tzenkethi BZ turned out and then was neglected. We saw how broken the Voth BZ has become. We saw the stupid high respawn rate in the Kobali BZ. I dread to think how badly a whole sector could be messed up if things go wrong.

And to my knowledge, nobody has stepped forward to even attempt to justify such negligence (that might be a mild word for cases where testers' reports are ignored). If you have to delay a launch to fix a serious problem - I seem to recall one of Nintendo's luminaries noting at one point that you can recover from a delayed launch, but a flawed one is another matter entirely (see also the old sayings 'measure twice, cut once' and 'haste makes waste'). Not only does this look bad, but in combination with an apparent lack of interest in learning about the underlying code, just leaves opportunities for further problems in the future.

warpangel

starkaos wrote: »

Is anyone else thinking we might finally get a reputation with a Battlezone that has no Elite Marks? The worst part about Tzenkethi was trying to get the Protomatter Microcontainers. Especially when you help take down all 3 dreadnoughts and they weren't awarded or when you get 8/9 zones captured and in a couple of minutes it goes down to 1/9.

No. There are like 2 reps with no elite mark, both ancient.

questerius

warpangel wrote: »

starkaos wrote: »

Is anyone else thinking we might finally get a reputation with a Battlezone that has no Elite Marks? The worst part about Tzenkethi was trying to get the Protomatter Microcontainers. Especially when you help take down all 3 dreadnoughts and they weren't awarded or when you get 8/9 zones captured and in a couple of minutes it goes down to 1/9.

No. There are like 2 reps with no elite mark, both ancient.

Nukara and Romulan to be exact.

postagepaid

Henceforth the new nickname for ViL will be "victory is loading (screens)" because there will be many and chances are loading will take longer than a spot of pewpew especially if the phantom on demand patcher is still lingering unfixed.

nommo

postagepaid wrote: »

Henceforth the new nickname for ViL will be "victory is loading (screens)" because there will be many and chances are loading will take longer than a spot of pewpew especially if the phantom on demand patcher is still lingering unfixed.

Nice one, that is funny.

starkaos

warpangel wrote: »

starkaos wrote: »

Is anyone else thinking we might finally get a reputation with a Battlezone that has no Elite Marks? The worst part about Tzenkethi was trying to get the Protomatter Microcontainers. Especially when you help take down all 3 dreadnoughts and they weren't awarded or when you get 8/9 zones captured and in a couple of minutes it goes down to 1/9.

No. There are like 2 reps with no elite mark, both ancient.

The Nukara and Romulan Reputations have Adventure Zones not Battlezones. Which is why I said "reputation with a Battlezone that has no Elite Marks" so the Nukara and Romulan Reputations were excluded from my question.

duncanidaho11

shadowfirefly00 wrote: »

And to my knowledge, nobody has stepped forward to even attempt to justify such negligence (that might be a mild word for cases where testers' reports are ignored).

It came up today on Ten Forward Weekly.

Linky in case folks missed it

There's interactions between functional components and that can't be fixed without digging impractically deep.


And for those here worried about the Gamma Quadrant battlezone, Kael and tribble people gave it a good test today. Jessie also gave a good run-down of what's a work in progress (ex. the cross-zone timer, some specific indicators.) Apart from that timer (new tech for the sector block, it's coming) the new zone looks fine.

starkaos wrote: »

The Nukara and Romulan Reputations have Adventure Zones not Battlezones. Which is why I said "reputation with a Battlezone that has no Elite Marks" so the Nukara and Romulan Reputations were excluded from my question.

The devs were coy but it's likely that there will be a new type of elite mark for the Dominion reputation (though it may be different in other ways, that remains to be seen.) The sector battle zone, however, is much more forgiving by design than the Tzenkethi battle zone. You can complete it solo, if necessary.

starkaos

duncanidaho11 wrote: »

starkaos wrote: »

The Nukara and Romulan Reputations have Adventure Zones not Battlezones. Which is why I said "reputation with a Battlezone that has no Elite Marks" so the Nukara and Romulan Reputations were excluded from my question.

The devs were coy but it's likely that there will be a new type of elite mark for the Dominion reputation (though it may be different in other ways, that remains to be seen.) The sector battle zone, however, is much more forgiving by design than the Tzenkethi battle zone. You can complete it solo, if necessary.

Almost anything is more forgiving by design than the Tzenkethi Battlezone. Every other Battlezone didn't give a hundredth of the frustration caused by the Tzenkethi Battlezone. Not sure if it is possible to solo the Gamma Quadrant Battlezone. Getting to the final boss is soloable due to each conquered zone giving additional time and not having to complete as many zones, but unless the final boss is scalable to the number of players in the Battlezone, then I doubt the final boss is soloable.

warpangel

starkaos wrote: »

warpangel wrote: »

starkaos wrote: »

Is anyone else thinking we might finally get a reputation with a Battlezone that has no Elite Marks? The worst part about Tzenkethi was trying to get the Protomatter Microcontainers. Especially when you help take down all 3 dreadnoughts and they weren't awarded or when you get 8/9 zones captured and in a couple of minutes it goes down to 1/9.

No. There are like 2 reps with no elite mark, both ancient.

The Nukara and Romulan Reputations have Adventure Zones not Battlezones. Which is why I said "reputation with a Battlezone that has no Elite Marks" so the Nukara and Romulan Reputations were excluded from my question.

That's not relevant. Cryptic hasn't made any rep with no EM since 2013. Not likely to start now.

postagepaid

The kethi BZ wasn't down to design it was the implementation that caused the issues.

Unless they're implying that the timers for recapturing and spawn rates are buried that deep into the code they can't get at them easily. If they took pride in their work to the point where they wanted people to experience it and have fun doing so then it would have been practical to do the changes.

It like wiring a house and having the fusebox located under the boiler & a concrete floor, only a complete idiot would do something like that and not realise that they'll face issues later.

For the gamma BZ if the timer keeps ticking all the time and doesn't have any sort of pause to compensate for loading in and out of multiple maps then they better not have that buried so deep they can't be bothered finding it.

One thing I can see potentially happening with this is for people to just wait for others to progress it so they can get in and blitz the boss before those that put the effort in get there.

legendarylycan

postagepaid wrote: »

One thing I can see potentially happening with this is for people to just wait for others to progress it so they can get in and blitz the boss before those that put the effort in get there.

you mean like what happened from the very start of the introduction of the voth BZ and still continues to this day, even though the BZ itself has been reduced in player count because of massive reward nerfs?​​

postagepaid

shadowfang240 wrote: »

postagepaid wrote: »

One thing I can see potentially happening with this is for people to just wait for others to progress it so they can get in and blitz the boss before those that put the effort in get there.

you mean like what happened from the very start of the introduction of the voth BZ and still continues to this day, even though the BZ itself has been reduced in player count because of massive reward nerfs?​​

Exactly that, and probably doing the tired old queue's to fill the time because of time/reward maths telling them to do so.

Unless each player will have a personal tally running where the time and effort put in prior to the boss is actually rewarded with something meaningful, fat chance I know since time&effort doesn't sell ships.