Well having everything character bound and faction bound switched to account bound would be nice. Then I would like them to add some nice things that can only be obtained klink side. This would lead to a nice chain of events:
1) People would switch over from their feds to get those things and transfer them back fed side.
2) People could use the shiny things they had unlocked already fed side to help them obtain the shiny klink things.
3) Whilst unlocking the shiny things klenk side they may form more off an attachment then they previously had to their klink character, especially considering that playing them would not now feel like they were nerfing themselves (thank you fed shiny things).
4) Some people will play klinks more.
5) Because people are playing klinks more we may see more klink content.
... maybe I am being too hopeful. But anyway, I think that remove faction restrictions in addition to character restrictions could only be a good thing.
There's a lot of stuff I think is just unreasonable to keep per character, like this:
DOff commendations, specializations, and especially reputations take way too much work and repetition to build up on more than one character. I'm nowhere close to getting any of those bonuses on any of my recruit characters because I'm just not willing to torture myself all over again, even for something as useful as the Temporal Operative rep item upgrades. We already have to work our butts of for days saving enough marks and dilithium for equipment projects, why should I have to work even harder just to unlock the ability to unlock something?
Lobi, dilithium, and lockbox special items are ridiculously expensive for single-character unlocks. What's the point in even trying to save up enough for something so miniscule like a pair of earrings (That don't even disclaim they don't work on cats smh) when you'll only ever be using it for that one character? Why should I have to open 10 lockboxes per character that wants the stupid things? It's too much already, and multiplying it by five or a hundred? That's unfair! Account unlocks for costumes, ships, lobi items, all that stuff, please. I've got a T6 infinity prize gathering dust because I don't want to waste it on a ship or character I don't use religiously.
Starship traits are a slog and mastery promotes build stagnation by making it a several hour long chore just to unlock a single one of the things. If you don't plan on letting us have the trait we paid for right out of the box, at least let us lower the amount of grind we need to do to get them.
Then I would like them to add some nice things that can only be obtained klink side.
Not sure how you missed that, given that you evidently continued to read the rest of my post. I never said there was anything nice Klink side. I said that something nice should be added.
You seem to have been looking for a reason to grind your axe. I mean your post makes you sound rather bitter about the KDFs treatment and yet the thing you have gone off on is the suggestion of something being done about it?
Was your point meant to be that after all this time its pointless to even hope for change? That would be a fair assertion, but if it was your intent to make it you have gone off on a bit of a tangent.
I'm only "grinding" to Tier 6 reps on one toon - simply to get the gear discount for the account - But none of my other toons will even do half the reps (and then only to Tier 5), because of the click, click, click, the 20hr CD, and the sheer drudgery of "the grind". So Cryptic looses a dil sink there.
If Rep Marks and rep equipment were transferable, that would make a huge difference. ( I know it's "supposed" to show how dedicated, and skillfull you are, achieving that level in a rep, but it no longer has any meaning, except ... more grind)
"Grinding" even to lvl 15 in any R&D school is a nightmare, so that's also out. It's easier to let the "gold seller" bots do all the grinding, and then just buy the stuff from the exchange. So another loss for Cryptic.
Account wide R&D skill unlocks would be great, so you could concentrate on just 1 school for each alt.
Lockbox and Lobi ships are out, except maybe as an exchange purchase, because they are BTC, and that's just a no win scenario as far as value goes.
I am not arguing against the QOL improvement possible here, but I fail to see how Cryptic loses out if you e. g. buy crafted items instead of crafting them yourself? (BTW I am also not sure that is an area where botting is effective, but little do I know about that)
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
I'm only "grinding" to Tier 6 reps on one toon - simply to get the gear discount for the account - But none of my other toons will even do half the reps (and then only to Tier 5), because of the click, click, click, the 20hr CD, and the sheer drudgery of "the grind". So Cryptic looses a dil sink there.
If Rep Marks and rep equipment were transferable, that would make a huge difference. ( I know it's "supposed" to show how dedicated, and skillfull you are, achieving that level in a rep, but it no longer has any meaning, except ... more grind)
"Grinding" even to lvl 15 in any R&D school is a nightmare, so that's also out. It's easier to let the "gold seller" bots do all the grinding, and then just buy the stuff from the exchange. So another loss for Cryptic.
Account wide R&D skill unlocks would be great, so you could concentrate on just 1 school for each alt.
Lockbox and Lobi ships are out, except maybe as an exchange purchase, because they are BTC, and that's just a no win scenario as far as value goes.
I am not arguing against the QOL improvement possible here, but I fail to see how Cryptic loses out if you e. g. buy crafted items instead of crafting them yourself? (BTW I am also not sure that is an area where botting is effective, but little do I know about that)
Crytpic looses because I am not spending "dilithium" to speed up the crafting process or to make the "Very Rare" components, (which is the one commodity (because of the dil exchange) they really don't want us to have a lot of, or spending 9000 hours logged in to the game upgrading the crafting school.
The 'bots' are the ones collecting all those piles, and piles of materials, and also creating thousands of the crafting components and selling them for stupidly low prices on the exchange.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that they are there, because it means you can actually make a profit from selling crafted items, the downside of course is that those crafted items are now selling for way less than they used to, because of the cheap accessibility of the materials/components.
At some point in the recent past the devs explained (on a podcast interview) that they were trying to shift mechanics from character unlocks to account unlocks, viewing the "account as the player" rather than each individual character.
With this being their stated design philosophy, what things currently tied to individual characters would you like to see applied to the entire account in the future?
I don't see the value in simply unlocking everything on all characters.
I do see the value in digital goods: i.e. tangible goods that I can buy for my account that
* are not destroyed unless I explicitly destroy them
* are tangible - they are a thing that can be moved around.
So for example I would hope that Ships in the future would work like this:
* Ships would be a tangible good. I can buy a ship and bind it to my account by unpacking it into my accounts 'shared' ship hangar.
* Once bound, I have a single instance of this ship. No matter if Zen, Lobi or EC was spent I have one instance of this ship.
* I can commission this ship - on ONE character, again no matter what currency was used.
* If I want a 2nd toon to have this ship I can buy a 2nd instance. Or do the holiday event with a 2nd toon.
* Or I can decommission the the ship to return it to the account hangar.
* If I delete a toon, all commissioned items are returned to my account storage for other characters to commission.
* If I have copies of ships I no longer want, a trade in program allows ships to be destroyed for something appropriately valuable - a chance at lockbox keys or ultra upgrades or something.
The next thing to address would be to ensure that its the account that does the grinding, not the characters:
The core principle here is, don't force a player to choose a particular character, or spend time logging characters in and out to do a grind.
* Crafting materials need to be shared across all characters on an account.
* EC and Dil too.
I believe all crafting skills produce account bound items, so - again - the skill levels attained should be account wide otherwise you're just forcing people to relog with crafting accounts. (This should be done in a way to ensure that a player does still need to level at least one of each career to 70 to get all crafting recipes)
I feel the admiralty system should be one system for the whole account - but the cat seems a bit out of the bag here where people currently have many toons running many admiralty missions to create dilithium & crafting materials who might have paid actual money for this privilege.
Nonetheless, forcing players to chain-relog through multiple toons is disruptive to social immersion.
Similar considerations apply to the DOFF system: It shouldn't matter which characters I choose to perform my doff missions on.
If this is the route they want to go down, then I'm fully on board I'm a big fan of things being shared across characters and snowballing them a bit. I like having things I've earned on other characters available as a reward on an alt. There's a lot of historic stuff that I'd like available across the board like FE series rewards and weekend awards, my main has so many more than my more recent characters. Lobi/lootbox rewards would be good, I might finally get on board with them as a system if that were the case.
Comments
1) People would switch over from their feds to get those things and transfer them back fed side.
2) People could use the shiny things they had unlocked already fed side to help them obtain the shiny klink things.
3) Whilst unlocking the shiny things klenk side they may form more off an attachment then they previously had to their klink character, especially considering that playing them would not now feel like they were nerfing themselves (thank you fed shiny things).
4) Some people will play klinks more.
5) Because people are playing klinks more we may see more klink content.
... maybe I am being too hopeful. But anyway, I think that remove faction restrictions in addition to character restrictions could only be a good thing.
DOff commendations, specializations, and especially reputations take way too much work and repetition to build up on more than one character. I'm nowhere close to getting any of those bonuses on any of my recruit characters because I'm just not willing to torture myself all over again, even for something as useful as the Temporal Operative rep item upgrades. We already have to work our butts of for days saving enough marks and dilithium for equipment projects, why should I have to work even harder just to unlock the ability to unlock something?
Lobi, dilithium, and lockbox special items are ridiculously expensive for single-character unlocks. What's the point in even trying to save up enough for something so miniscule like a pair of earrings (That don't even disclaim they don't work on cats smh) when you'll only ever be using it for that one character? Why should I have to open 10 lockboxes per character that wants the stupid things? It's too much already, and multiplying it by five or a hundred? That's unfair! Account unlocks for costumes, ships, lobi items, all that stuff, please. I've got a T6 infinity prize gathering dust because I don't want to waste it on a ship or character I don't use religiously.
Starship traits are a slog and mastery promotes build stagnation by making it a several hour long chore just to unlock a single one of the things. If you don't plan on letting us have the trait we paid for right out of the box, at least let us lower the amount of grind we need to do to get them.
Erm, you only had to read the second sentence of my post:
Not sure how you missed that, given that you evidently continued to read the rest of my post. I never said there was anything nice Klink side. I said that something nice should be added.
You seem to have been looking for a reason to grind your axe. I mean your post makes you sound rather bitter about the KDFs treatment and yet the thing you have gone off on is the suggestion of something being done about it?
Was your point meant to be that after all this time its pointless to even hope for change? That would be a fair assertion, but if it was your intent to make it you have gone off on a bit of a tangent.
I am not arguing against the QOL improvement possible here, but I fail to see how Cryptic loses out if you e. g. buy crafted items instead of crafting them yourself? (BTW I am also not sure that is an area where botting is effective, but little do I know about that)
Crytpic looses because I am not spending "dilithium" to speed up the crafting process or to make the "Very Rare" components, (which is the one commodity (because of the dil exchange) they really don't want us to have a lot of, or spending 9000 hours logged in to the game upgrading the crafting school.
The 'bots' are the ones collecting all those piles, and piles of materials, and also creating thousands of the crafting components and selling them for stupidly low prices on the exchange.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that they are there, because it means you can actually make a profit from selling crafted items, the downside of course is that those crafted items are now selling for way less than they used to, because of the cheap accessibility of the materials/components.
I don't see the value in simply unlocking everything on all characters.
I do see the value in digital goods: i.e. tangible goods that I can buy for my account that
* are not destroyed unless I explicitly destroy them
* are tangible - they are a thing that can be moved around.
So for example I would hope that Ships in the future would work like this:
* Ships would be a tangible good. I can buy a ship and bind it to my account by unpacking it into my accounts 'shared' ship hangar.
* Once bound, I have a single instance of this ship. No matter if Zen, Lobi or EC was spent I have one instance of this ship.
* I can commission this ship - on ONE character, again no matter what currency was used.
* If I want a 2nd toon to have this ship I can buy a 2nd instance. Or do the holiday event with a 2nd toon.
* Or I can decommission the the ship to return it to the account hangar.
* If I delete a toon, all commissioned items are returned to my account storage for other characters to commission.
* If I have copies of ships I no longer want, a trade in program allows ships to be destroyed for something appropriately valuable - a chance at lockbox keys or ultra upgrades or something.
The core principle here is, don't force a player to choose a particular character, or spend time logging characters in and out to do a grind.
* Crafting materials need to be shared across all characters on an account.
* EC and Dil too.
I believe all crafting skills produce account bound items, so - again - the skill levels attained should be account wide otherwise you're just forcing people to relog with crafting accounts. (This should be done in a way to ensure that a player does still need to level at least one of each career to 70 to get all crafting recipes)
I feel the admiralty system should be one system for the whole account - but the cat seems a bit out of the bag here where people currently have many toons running many admiralty missions to create dilithium & crafting materials who might have paid actual money for this privilege.
Nonetheless, forcing players to chain-relog through multiple toons is disruptive to social immersion.
Similar considerations apply to the DOFF system: It shouldn't matter which characters I choose to perform my doff missions on.