[...] I'm a good player with pretty decent builds. I have an old school bronze league toon.
For those who don't know, that is a level where you have proven that you can do 10,000 DPS in ISA.
I'm joining a Random TFO so I don't know where and with who I'll be teamed. My builds are more than sufficient for any normal random match.
What happened here was I de-lucked out and got a team where at least three of the players wiped out two of the cube groups in seconds.
[...]
Well, at least you weren't the Borg in that TFO. Imagine how THEY must have felt.
Seriously, though: The problem isn't solvable via matching. It should be solved with a different approach: A system that adjusts the number of players in the TFO to the effectiveness their characters have shown over the last, say, 100 TFO's.
So a player who can do ISA alone will just do it alone, and nobody would be bothered.
Given that Cryptic no longer allows us to enter queues alone even when we would want to, that seems like a losing proposition.
Nevermind that ISA is a dinosaur. By the current standards everyone can do queues alone, because they will auto-win after the timer runs out.
> @sophlogimo said:
> arionisa wrote: »
>
> And now a word from on the fence...
>
> Gear makes a vast difference, take a crappy player, have them copy the build of one of the top DPS players and their DPS numbers will increase dramatically, but only in comparison to what they themselves, or an equally crappy player was doing..
>
>
>
>
> If that was all there is to it, that'd be fine. You'd want skill to make a difference.
>
> But the problem is that gear, and gear alone, allows for a multiplication of the damage by factors that are insane. Some of that is warranted, because of course you want to achieve some progression in the game, but 980k dps? Almost a million points of damage per second?
>
> Can we agree that there is a point where gear-boosting achieves too much?
Actually if I were to copy a 500k DPS build I guarantee my performance would drop. Because the build doesn't match my skill or playstyle. I would suffer from the "improvement" in gear.
Mine would do too even with all the gear available but that just happens if one compares the outcome of a teamed DPS record run where 4 players play to your advantage with pug runs where parts of your team struggle to avoid the AFK penalty.
But yea lets aim for chaneging the game rules on basis of absurd DPS records nobody encounters in pug runs instad of asking if perhaps the level of team contribution for the AFK pen should be lowered from 1% to 0,5%.
Would at least throw this discussion in the right direction.
I mean I have non-meta builds and undergeared toons as well. Why do I never get an AFK penalty ever? Ah ok... 1% of the team contribution... thats so absurdly low already. You just need to start pets and set them on attack.
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I found it really really hard to get an AFK penalty without being actually AFK. In CSA usually a few shots on a splinter do the job. I sometimes get stuck on the loading screen and never ever got a penalty even when I didn't even reach the entity. Just fire on the first thing that comes in range.
As for ISA and all the throwing around numbers..... stop looking at DPS tables. You will NEVER EVER see those numbers doing a random queue run. You manage to get the penalty in there in a random run you should think about not doing it on advanced. Yes I often enough see 2-3 people helplessly trying to destroy a single sphere without scratching it but that's really not a problem of the system or other players that sign up with appropriate gear.
Well ok you could say it's a system issue as the game let's everyone sign up for content that can't be played without a certain level of gear and gameplay knowledge, but honestly that's a problem in a lot of games. Here it's a really tough one as tooooo damn many thing effect the combat performance of your ship.
[...]
Seriously, though: The problem isn't solvable via matching. It should be solved with a different approach: A system that adjusts the number of players in the TFO to the effectiveness their characters have shown over the last, say, 100 TFO's.
So a player who can do ISA alone will just do it alone, and nobody would be bothered.
Given that Cryptic no longer allows us to enter queues alone even when we would want to, that seems like a losing proposition.
Nevermind that ISA is a dinosaur. By the current standards everyone can do queues alone, because they will auto-win after the timer runs out.
Didn't John Hegner say in a livestream they were planning to go back to non-optional "optionals" for Advanced and Elite content?
Anyway, of course I meant "be able to win the TFO with all optionals alone".
I would be interested in knowing how you expect the game to know who can win a queue with optionals alone, other than putting them in alone and making them try?
Also, a lot of the optionals aren't even theoretically winnable alone, because they require players in multiple places at once. Like for example in the current event queue, you can't defend all the transports alone because they're spread too far apart.
It's important to note that the game is more than just ISA.
But yea lets aim for chaneging the game rules on basis of absurd DPS records nobody encounters in pug runs instad of asking if perhaps the level of team contribution for the AFK pen should be lowered from 1% to 0,5%.
Would at least throw this discussion in the right direction.
I mean I have non-meta builds and undergeared toons as well. Why do I never get an AFK penalty ever? Ah ok... 1% of the team contribution... thats so absurdly low already. You just need to start pets and set them on attack.
Where does that "1%" come from anyway? It's been repeated for years but nobody ever cites a source.
Well, whatever the Invisible Damage Quota is, I agree it's absurdly low. Lowering it any further wouldn't make any difference. Pretty much the only way to get AFKed as it is, is to never get a shot off in the first place.
Fact is tying an AFK detection to damage at all is stupid. It's impossible to set a threshold low enough not to produce false positives (at least in the content of old that can be rushed through by good players). And also impossible to set one high enough to actually catch any real AFKers without effectively permabanning half the playerbase.
Complaints like in the OP are common. Replies from the usual suspects are always the same, and usually useless: "Learn the game" (without asking if he maybe just made the grave mistake of spawning five seconds too late, of course), "this cannot happen ever, must be your fault", that kind of stuff. The only thing that is right now missing from this thread (thankfully) is calling the OP a liar.
Of course it can happen. And of course it's not their fault. It's Cryptic's fault for making a faulty system. But advising the victims to either learn to avoid it or to not play content where it can come up in is all we can do about it here on the forums.
There are two possible solutions: Either decrease the range (for example, by making a more interesting, more complicated damage model that treats critical hits not as damage bonus, but special effects of a hit, for instance, thus reducing the DPS range drastically), or segregate the players so that teams are not too powerful for the content at hand... for example, by varying team size in the queues based on past performance (and being open to player-chosen group sizes in private runs with predefined teams).
Yeah, that's not gonna happen. The AFK penalty was created as a minimum-work quickie patch to let them say "we did something" about a "problem" that was 99% exaggerated whining. They're not going to completely redesign major systems to support it. If they actually thought the false positives were a problem, they'd just turn the whole thing off. It's not like it actually stops any AFKers anyway.
Now, if you truly believe the problem doesn't exist, prove it with actual data. The OP is an eyewitness account of the problem actually happening in the wild, but hey, who cares for empirics, right.
Cryptic has the actual data. And they haven't done anything about it. Must mean they don't see it as a big problem. I don't necessarily agree with them, but then I don't have any data to prove them wrong either.
And I do have to admit all the content made in recent years has been such that it probably isn't a problem. Timegates and respawning enemies guarantee everyone gets a chance to shoot something.
Where does that "1%" come from anyway? It's been repeated for years but nobody ever cites a source.
Well, whatever the Invisible Damage Quota is, I agree it's absurdly low. Lowering it any further wouldn't make any difference. Pretty much the only way to get AFKed as it is, is to never get a shot off in the first place.
I also saw this figure turn up in forums and DPS chans first. No solid confirmation on it as far as I can tell. What I can tell however is that the combatlog reader gives very detailed info on whats going on in every match. What I can also input here is that last week I ran with a fleet-mate who only managed around 2% of the teams contribution in a public ISA the two of us ended up with. He got no pen and the two of us continued playing.
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Gear alone does not produce those numbers. It takes gear, plus buffs, plus the proper skill tree, and usually a keybind sequence to activate the buffs fast enough. Gear alone will not do it.
You are most certainly right with that.
Still what most forget is the huge impact a team has. I dont know anybody who managed 500k+ in a bad pug or in a solo ISA so far. Perhaps there are one or two players in game who could stress that figure at the moment but I would not even bet in their favor here.
The infamous "500k build" that flies through this thread (right along with even more absurd figures of 30 second runs) is not even a 500k build in a team where the other players are in danger of getting an AFK pen. They need to use thier keyboard, and need to do so in a precise way, to make the "500k build" of you or me happen in the first place.
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Complaints like in the OP are common. Replies from the usual suspects are always the same, and usually useless: "Learn the game" (without asking if he maybe just made the grave mistake of spawning five seconds too late, of course), "this cannot happen ever, must be your fault", that kind of stuff. The only thing that is right now missing from this thread (thankfully) is calling the OP a liar.
I mean, I'm lazy in my setup and I pull 50-90k depending on the character and I've still had an AFK penalty here and there. Usually from rubberbanding or not paying attention at the start. Best thing to do in this scenario is swap characters and move on.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
Where does that "1%" come from anyway? It's been repeated for years but nobody ever cites a source.
Well, whatever the Invisible Damage Quota is, I agree it's absurdly low. Lowering it any further wouldn't make any difference. Pretty much the only way to get AFKed as it is, is to never get a shot off in the first place.
IF (as it seems) the AFK penalty is in part derived from contribution to the team damage, then a very high team damage can put a beginner in the "below threshhold" category easily with shooting at everything.
In legacy content with no timegates, a high-performance team will actually have less total damage than a low-performance team, since there will be less time for enemies to spawn and/or regenerate health.
If it was a team damage, we'd get people complaining about getting AFKed in the timed mass slaughter queues like Dranuur Gauntlet, where DPS players can put out basically unlimited amount of damage against enemies that respawn almost instantly. But instead we consistently see the complaints in the "fast" queues where the amount of total enemy HP is more or less fixed and the only variable is how quickly it gets knocked down.
That suggests it's probably not a percentage, but a fixed number. Do X damage to count as having participated, whatever X is. This would explain why it's possible for weak players to fail to hit the threshold in the fast queues but succeed in the slow ones, even if they're in a team that vastly outperforms them.
Fact is tying an AFK detection to damage at all is stupid.
Agreed. But tying it to commands given is also not good, because otherwise, some people will just have a bot send a keypress now and then, and the idea is to avoid lazy people from suceeding in exploiting the game.
Avoiding the current system doesn't even need that. You just have to shoot something in the beginning. It's amazing how people still blindly believe the system actually does anything besides punish newbies for being new.
Tracking control inputs could be done for a significantly high threshold without false positives, whereas the damage threshold is set so low as to be completely useless and still regularly produces false positives.
Or you know, they could just stop making missions that players can win automatically by doing nothing.
I wouldn't be surprised if some jobs, like getting particles and bringing them to USS Jupiter In GK, automatically prevented an AFK penalty, and the problem with the old Borg TFO's is just that they don't have such an activity.
I don't know. I've certainly seen people complain they get AFKed after, for example, only freeing ships in Azure Nebula while a friend else distracts the tholians. A perfectly reasonable strategy, but 0 damage = AFK.
Of course it can happen. And of course it's not their fault. It's Cryptic's fault for making a faulty system. But advising the victims to either learn to avoid it or to not play content where it can come up in is all we can do about it here on the forums.
True, but what we are seeing here is not that. We see dismissal of the original complaint, instead "yup, it's stupid, but it's not gonna change, here are some workarounds:".
And of course, threads like this one are also feedback for the devs. They need that in order to do their jobs.
We've been giving the devs that feedback for years and it hasn't changed. I for one am past believing it ever will.
Yes. Maybe the whole problem really IS that the older purely damage-based TFO's like IS, CS, KS, and CC need a revamp that adds such elements.
Cryptic has talked about, many times, how they want to get to a point where they can revamp the old Borg TFOs, which is part of the reason they haven't released elite versions of them.
You mean re-released them. We had them back in the day.
Yes. Maybe the whole problem really IS that the older purely damage-based TFO's like IS, CS, KS, and CC need a revamp that adds such elements.
Cryptic has talked about, many times, how they want to get to a point where they can revamp the old Borg TFOs, which is part of the reason they haven't released elite versions of them.
You mean re-released them. We had them back in the day.
Yes, but the "Elite" back then was about the level of "Advanced" is now. When they introduced the Normal/Advanced/Elite tiers for queues, the old "Elite" queues were not as difficult as the new Elites. The buffs for NPC damage and hit points was considerably higher in the new Elite than the old Elite.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Yes. Maybe the whole problem really IS that the older purely damage-based TFO's like IS, CS, KS, and CC need a revamp that adds such elements.
Cryptic has talked about, many times, how they want to get to a point where they can revamp the old Borg TFOs, which is part of the reason they haven't released elite versions of them.
You mean re-released them. We had them back in the day.
Yes, but the "Elite" back then was about the level of "Advanced" is now. When they introduced the Normal/Advanced/Elite tiers for queues, the old "Elite" queues were not as difficult as the new Elites. The buffs for NPC damage and hit points was considerably higher in the new Elite than the old Elite.
True. But, they were fun, and challenging. I Want a 14 day event to return us to that time period. You know strip the player of all the new goodies, like T6 ships, the expanded traits, and specializations. Just to let them go at it with just their T5 ship from promotion, 9 traits, and a skill tree. But, that will never happen, would be fun though.
[...]
Seriously, though: The problem isn't solvable via matching. It should be solved with a different approach: A system that adjusts the number of players in the TFO to the effectiveness their characters have shown over the last, say, 100 TFO's.
So a player who can do ISA alone will just do it alone, and nobody would be bothered.
Given that Cryptic no longer allows us to enter queues alone even when we would want to, that seems like a losing proposition.
Nevermind that ISA is a dinosaur. By the current standards everyone can do queues alone, because they will auto-win after the timer runs out.
Didn't John Hegner say in a livestream they were planning to go back to non-optional "optionals" for Advanced and Elite content?
Anyway, of course I meant "be able to win the TFO with all optionals alone".
This would be nice. We had it for a bit during the Iconian War, but it got nixed again. This would make Infected Ground, or Infected Manus as it's sometimes called(which is its actual name), and Khitomer in Stasis fun again. Just let me get a salt collector set up first.
While we're on the subject of TFO's. Some updated small craft and maps for them would be nice. I've been wanting to get back into Atmosphere Assault and the Vault lately. I should work on getting my Peregrine geared up.
A lot of people suggest making your own ship a dps build as a solution to not being able to get in on a mission. They seem to be missing part of the problem.
Suppose I have a supermegasillyridiculousultra dps built ship. I can do a billion dps. Now, if I go into a mission and the other players ALSO have similar builds, and as a result I can't get a single shot at a single target, I'm STILL going to get an afk penalty.
If everything is dead before you can engage, then your build is irrelevant.
But no mission is just a gauntlet of n NPC ships all getting into firing range instantly. The enemy ships are distributed across an area larger than any single ship's effective reach.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Comments
Nevermind that ISA is a dinosaur. By the current standards everyone can do queues alone, because they will auto-win after the timer runs out.
Mine would do too even with all the gear available but that just happens if one compares the outcome of a teamed DPS record run where 4 players play to your advantage with pug runs where parts of your team struggle to avoid the AFK penalty.
But yea lets aim for chaneging the game rules on basis of absurd DPS records nobody encounters in pug runs instad of asking if perhaps the level of team contribution for the AFK pen should be lowered from 1% to 0,5%.
Would at least throw this discussion in the right direction.
I mean I have non-meta builds and undergeared toons as well. Why do I never get an AFK penalty ever? Ah ok... 1% of the team contribution... thats so absurdly low already. You just need to start pets and set them on attack.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
As for ISA and all the throwing around numbers..... stop looking at DPS tables. You will NEVER EVER see those numbers doing a random queue run. You manage to get the penalty in there in a random run you should think about not doing it on advanced. Yes I often enough see 2-3 people helplessly trying to destroy a single sphere without scratching it but that's really not a problem of the system or other players that sign up with appropriate gear.
Well ok you could say it's a system issue as the game let's everyone sign up for content that can't be played without a certain level of gear and gameplay knowledge, but honestly that's a problem in a lot of games. Here it's a really tough one as tooooo damn many thing effect the combat performance of your ship.
Also, a lot of the optionals aren't even theoretically winnable alone, because they require players in multiple places at once. Like for example in the current event queue, you can't defend all the transports alone because they're spread too far apart.
It's important to note that the game is more than just ISA.
Where does that "1%" come from anyway? It's been repeated for years but nobody ever cites a source.
Well, whatever the Invisible Damage Quota is, I agree it's absurdly low. Lowering it any further wouldn't make any difference. Pretty much the only way to get AFKed as it is, is to never get a shot off in the first place.
Fact is tying an AFK detection to damage at all is stupid. It's impossible to set a threshold low enough not to produce false positives (at least in the content of old that can be rushed through by good players). And also impossible to set one high enough to actually catch any real AFKers without effectively permabanning half the playerbase.
Of course it can happen. And of course it's not their fault. It's Cryptic's fault for making a faulty system. But advising the victims to either learn to avoid it or to not play content where it can come up in is all we can do about it here on the forums.
Yeah, that's not gonna happen. The AFK penalty was created as a minimum-work quickie patch to let them say "we did something" about a "problem" that was 99% exaggerated whining. They're not going to completely redesign major systems to support it. If they actually thought the false positives were a problem, they'd just turn the whole thing off. It's not like it actually stops any AFKers anyway.
Cryptic has the actual data. And they haven't done anything about it. Must mean they don't see it as a big problem. I don't necessarily agree with them, but then I don't have any data to prove them wrong either.
And I do have to admit all the content made in recent years has been such that it probably isn't a problem. Timegates and respawning enemies guarantee everyone gets a chance to shoot something.
I also saw this figure turn up in forums and DPS chans first. No solid confirmation on it as far as I can tell. What I can tell however is that the combatlog reader gives very detailed info on whats going on in every match. What I can also input here is that last week I ran with a fleet-mate who only managed around 2% of the teams contribution in a public ISA the two of us ended up with. He got no pen and the two of us continued playing.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
You are most certainly right with that.
Still what most forget is the huge impact a team has. I dont know anybody who managed 500k+ in a bad pug or in a solo ISA so far. Perhaps there are one or two players in game who could stress that figure at the moment but I would not even bet in their favor here.
The infamous "500k build" that flies through this thread (right along with even more absurd figures of 30 second runs) is not even a 500k build in a team where the other players are in danger of getting an AFK pen. They need to use thier keyboard, and need to do so in a precise way, to make the "500k build" of you or me happen in the first place.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Sounds like there isn't really an issue then. 99% success rate is usually nothing to complain about.
If it was a team damage, we'd get people complaining about getting AFKed in the timed mass slaughter queues like Dranuur Gauntlet, where DPS players can put out basically unlimited amount of damage against enemies that respawn almost instantly. But instead we consistently see the complaints in the "fast" queues where the amount of total enemy HP is more or less fixed and the only variable is how quickly it gets knocked down.
That suggests it's probably not a percentage, but a fixed number. Do X damage to count as having participated, whatever X is. This would explain why it's possible for weak players to fail to hit the threshold in the fast queues but succeed in the slow ones, even if they're in a team that vastly outperforms them.
Avoiding the current system doesn't even need that. You just have to shoot something in the beginning. It's amazing how people still blindly believe the system actually does anything besides punish newbies for being new.
Tracking control inputs could be done for a significantly high threshold without false positives, whereas the damage threshold is set so low as to be completely useless and still regularly produces false positives.
Or you know, they could just stop making missions that players can win automatically by doing nothing.
I don't know. I've certainly seen people complain they get AFKed after, for example, only freeing ships in Azure Nebula while a friend else distracts the tholians. A perfectly reasonable strategy, but 0 damage = AFK.
We've been giving the devs that feedback for years and it hasn't changed. I for one am past believing it ever will.
You mean re-released them. We had them back in the day.
Yes, but the "Elite" back then was about the level of "Advanced" is now. When they introduced the Normal/Advanced/Elite tiers for queues, the old "Elite" queues were not as difficult as the new Elites. The buffs for NPC damage and hit points was considerably higher in the new Elite than the old Elite.
True. But, they were fun, and challenging. I Want a 14 day event to return us to that time period. You know strip the player of all the new goodies, like T6 ships, the expanded traits, and specializations. Just to let them go at it with just their T5 ship from promotion, 9 traits, and a skill tree. But, that will never happen, would be fun though.
This would be nice. We had it for a bit during the Iconian War, but it got nixed again. This would make Infected Ground, or Infected Manus as it's sometimes called(which is its actual name), and Khitomer in Stasis fun again. Just let me get a salt collector set up first.
While we're on the subject of TFO's. Some updated small craft and maps for them would be nice. I've been wanting to get back into Atmosphere Assault and the Vault lately. I should work on getting my Peregrine geared up.
My character Tsin'xing
But no mission is just a gauntlet of n NPC ships all getting into firing range instantly. The enemy ships are distributed across an area larger than any single ship's effective reach.
You forgot to slot an impulse engine, right?
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.