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Anyone else feel the game's gotten too over complicated?
lukem2409
Member Posts: 100 Arc User
This isn't a cheap shot at the devs, nor a complaint, simply an observation designed to encourage healthy discussion.
It's kind of inevitable that a game that's been running this long would become this 'heavy' for want of a better term. I just feel like all the item choice is almost crazy. From different weapons to shields, not to mention all the grinding involved with getting decent gear now.
As a long time player (since launch) I'm of the view that the game needs an overhaul and some simplification, especially for those of us who are fans but don't have the time to get so involved due to career/commitments etc. But this is just my opinion and I'm curious to know what the rest of the player base thinks.
It's kind of inevitable that a game that's been running this long would become this 'heavy' for want of a better term. I just feel like all the item choice is almost crazy. From different weapons to shields, not to mention all the grinding involved with getting decent gear now.
As a long time player (since launch) I'm of the view that the game needs an overhaul and some simplification, especially for those of us who are fans but don't have the time to get so involved due to career/commitments etc. But this is just my opinion and I'm curious to know what the rest of the player base thinks.
Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges
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Works for me fine
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
No. This game is insanely easy to play.....and I'm not joking. 9 years ago, it was harder; when Delta Rising it got harder still......then it got nerfed because some people couldn't handle the NPC's........now, again, the game is insanely easy.
If you are trying to do everything at once (which, admittedly, many newer players would do), you have to contend with Admiralty, Reputations, DOffing/Commendation XP, Captain skills/traits, Ship levelling, Fleet crediting, gear selection and upgrading, events to participate in, episodes to complete, achievements to unlock, etc. etc. And of course, Dil and EC earning.
Do it all at once, it is too much. However STO is designed so that each of these systems kicks in at various stages of development, so that you can basically get used to each system one by one and layer them as you progress.
Now if you are on the other end, an experienced player with multiple characters, again it can become overwhelming if you are trying to do too many of those systems at once on several characters. So yes there is a lot to do, but it is (as said above) all optional. You don't actually need to optimize all those things on each character every day.
For myself, I used to do all the things in the game on each of my captains. Then they added more things to do. Then they added more more things to do. Then they upped the things to do with new tiers, so you had to do them longer.
Pretty soon there was no way I was going to be doing all the things on all the captains every day. Now I just work on 2-3 captains a day, and I do maybe 3-4 Admiralties, and 8-10 DOff missions, and maybe one of the Endeavours, and do the reps on whatever captain I am running a mission or Endeavour on. Everything progresses (though not at max speed), I always have something useful to do, the load is manageable, and I'm never in danger of maxing someone out and wondering "well now what do I do?".
The problem is that the game is bad at teaching you what things you need to know and what you don't need to know as well as teaching how to do those things you need to know even at basic level. The good thing is that the devs are aware of this, however they've not yet figured out how to fix that issue.
Having said that, there is now so much stuff to do that trying to do it all, especially on multiple toons can be overwhelming, but all that stuff is totally optional and none of it has to be done. As someone else said, trying to do anything and everything on each and every toon, every day would be a fulltime job (my paraphrase of what was actually said). So I break it down and only work on a few things at a time, based on my current priority "needs". I still have JH toons and new(er) DR toons that haven't progressed much beyond the tutorials although the DR toons are all level 50-65 just from running R&D, and that is currently all I do with them and I don't even do that every time I play.
This game isn't complicated at all and is no more overwhelming than each individual players makes it.
Of course that is just my opinion, just as the OPs post wast just their opinion.
> I often feel the contrary, that the game is way too simple. Imagine we dont even have to manually to go to docking areas/pads - all is automatic by pressing dock into station
Which is not even consistent from place to place on doing it.
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.'
"I think the game has gotten too complicated" doesn't necessarily mean "gotten too hard". You can have a game that's relatively easy, but still has way too many overlapping & interlocking systems, busy UI, dozens/hundreds of required items, etc.
And yeah, MMOs tend to pile up system upon system as the get older & have expansions. Gotta add Something New every big expansion, and eventually those Something News turn into a giant pile of confusion for some/many. It varies, of course, depending on the systems and how much they inter-relate. /shrug
...actually, it's not just MMOs, but any "live" game - Path of Exile (a Diablo-like) adds some big new system with every Season, and it just turns into a big mess at endgame with all sorts of stuff to keep track of and/or get ambushed by as you grind levels.
The flavor of the month energy type might parse a little higher for DPS, but mark XV anything is good enough for elite content.
I pick gear based on the theme for a character, which can include the color of the beams. Space Barbie is the real endgame.
I prefer to view STO as a pick and choose menu, ala a buffet. Grab what you want and leave the rest behind, until you get curious later on (or not at all). To each his own!
...and the bottom line is that, despite what some folks in these very forums would maintain, you don't actually need about half of that to enjoy playing the game - unless your joy comes from things like grinding for weeks to ensure you've got all the latest and greatest, in which case you probably don't think the game's complicated anyway. You don't need gold Mark XV Spiral Wave Disruptors all over your ship - you want them. There's nothing in this game that can't be defeated with the gear that's dropped in the course of missions, with absolutely no grinding at all. I know this because I hate grinding, and I hate the concept of needing to constantly upgrade your gear to the latest "season" (what is this, an MMO or the Paris Fashion Show?), but in STO I can take my captains up against whatever they face at their current levels and win. I don't always win the first time, and starting around Delta Rising I couldn't just faceroll my way through everything (came as quite a surprise when I had to figure out how to maneuver my beloved prototype-Odyssey-class science cruiser against a Vaadwaur artillery barrage), but nothing's impossible even with gear that barely brushes against purple and seldom exceeds Mk XII.
And the mobs in this game aren't complex or difficult just bullet spongy or on occasion glitchy.
What the game sorely needs though is some stream lining of the menus and some better tutorials for new players. I know of a few players who were enjoying the game but quit because they couldn't figure out some basic things and got frustrated.
Also why don't all the TFO;s have a voice over explaining what the objectives are? Lots of players run around like headless chickens because they either haven't read the text at the start or didn't comprehend it. A quick dialogue explaining roughly what to do would be much better and more dramatic/immersive. The same voice could then call out what to do as objectives are complete/changed.
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I wish there was some sort of tutorial. I've been playing for a few months and my experience has been that I pretty much stumbled into/discovered stuff of which I had no prior knowledge. There is also quite a few things that needed to be ground out: level, rep, admiralty, doffs, etc. Events, rewards, traits...so yeah, my take is that this is pretty complicated.
This is Spacebar Online.
True, it is not that complicated, only not very well explained at times.
For example, I am one of those people who left the game years ago after only playing it for a little while. To me it seemed that it required a joystick like a flightsim game because the keyboard maneuvering is totally counterintuitive and not at all fun (especially since the merge with Perfect World caused collisions that corrupted my login and the recurring hassle soured the experience even further).
Then early last year some friends talked me into trying it again and muscle memory from a different game led me to discover the double-button-down analog steering that was never mentioned at all in the tutorial and the space part of the game became fun instead of something to slog though until the next ground scene.
Going outside the game to find information (which a lot of people do not do) doesn't always return useful results, and ingame instructions (especially TFO instructions) are often so oddly worded (like the "stereo instructions" the Beetlejuice movie makes fun of) that they raise more questions than they answer.
For TFOs in particular the biggest complication is actually a lack of functional ingame voice which means voice is a tangled mess of incompatible third party systems so the usual vocal coordinator type you find in many game raids is missing here and everyone is left to bumble around until they discover what the instructions actually mean on their own.
As for the rest, a big part of the game is experimenting to see how the various synergies come together and plotting your own course though the various things to do which is actually a good thing since you do not have to do exactly the same thing for every new character (though some of the UI features for some of that do need some serious work, especially when it comes to filtering and organizing things).
To me, the game does not seem complicated at all. But then again, I have been here for all the changes.. I was introduced to new systems like Admiralty, Upgrades, Endeavors and similar systems over time. For someone that starts the game fresh from zero today.. I can definitely see how things would seem overwhelming and overly complicated.
I have friends who have attempted to start playing STO and have quit because they felt overwhelmed. Even when I first started, I had a friend helping me though to understand things and this was back during Legacy of Romulus. To be fair, the tutorials have gotten MUCH better since then, but the game has also grown exponentially over that time.
The best advice I can give any new players is.. don't worry about all the 'extra' stuff right away. Play the game, do the missions and enjoy the story. If you do it that way, then no.. I don't think the game is too complicated. Just play casual, relax and have fun.. there will be plenty of time to worry about things like griding resources, building reputations, upgrading gear etc after you hit 60+.
If you try and take in almost 10 years of MMO all at once.. yeah.. it's probably going to feel like way too much.
I agree. it started with removing some of the harder missions. I remember a mission, I forget which arc, or evn planet, but you had to scan/ collect some items and one was on top of a stone arch, and it was a royal pain in the tail to get up there. wasn't even easy to figure out it WAS up there. there are other missions that use to be very difficult but have really been streamlined down
And I think they have done a pretty good job so far.
It's very difficult to synthesize 10 years worth of content into a tutorial system that doesn't seem daunting at first. Anyone that remembers the original game tutorial (what there was of it) probably appreciates what we have now.
It's a tough task, but I think they have done a fairly good job so far.