Time Travel - their use of it wasn't very intelligent. They flew to Sector 001 and THEN used their time-travel tech. If they'd been a little more intelligent about this they'd have time travelled from a point of safety (i.e. where no risk of being attacked by Federation Starships) and then proceeded to Earth unchallenged.
And despite having the tech to time-travel, they never bother with it again.
We didn't get the reason why they couldn't do so. My guess is that their temporal displacement tech was somehow hazardous uncertain and they felt a direct attack was safer. Facing failure, they adapted and revised their strategy (read: resorted to plan B );
Diplomacy? In almost all of those cases they had an ulterior motive.
Don't everyone using diplomacy do?
Their abilty to 'devise new weapons against species that out-adapted them' apparently didn't apply to Voyager.Then again, they'd been so watered-down by then that they were a bit of a joke anyway.
Voyager was merely an amusement/annoyance for them, not worthy to vest more resources. Only in Dark Frontier, they assimilated two worlds, adding 300M individual to their collective. Think of it with cold hard logic: Would you waste tons of resources on a single ship your expert opinion says isn't a real threat and lose countless conquest opportunities or would you ignore that single little ship with 248 life forms (including Neelix!) and dedicate your resources to most efficient endeavours? The Borg clearly did the later.
Not entirely sure what you mean r.e 'compassion' - the only emotion shown in those examples were FORMER Borg drones who had regained their pre-assimilation personalities.
You clearly forget:
in Drone, as One actively sabotages the Sphere, near the end, the Hivemind is clearly heard begging for its life;
in Dark Frontier, pt 2, when the Queen was "plugged in" on Seven, and experienced emotions, to then release the tractor beam hold hence sparing that last ship with 3 lifeforms;
in Unimatrix Zero, pt 2, the Queen comes face to face with the little boy ("still in maturation chamber", according to Seven). Not only the Queen could have overpowered him on the spot (meaning he would obviously have subsequently been killed in real life, like the dozen of beheaded drones seen multiple times in the Queen's chamber in Unimatrix 1), but she talked with him and toured Unimatrix Zero. However, even off screen, she didn't kill said little boy, as he's subsequently seen in the episode. To me, not killing/assimilating children for emotional reason does not fit Borg's MO, that normally put all this kids in maturating chamber after initiating their assimilation. About 20 kids were depicted accordingly so far in the franchise.
1. The Queen is active on all cubes via the Vinculum, her body is assembled on site as needed, but the body is not her, killing it means nothing to her.
I am unconvinced by that. I really doubt that each and single Borg ship has a Queen chamber and Queen body. Remember that the first actual Queen chamber depicted in Voyager formed a single sizable ship in Dark Frontier (the Octahedron, also depicted ingame). I assume that both her unique shape and design meant she was mostly composed of extensive communication tech. She was just a bit smaller than her two Cubes escorts. I seriously doubt that the Borg would dedicate/waste about 80% of the space on every single Cube (forget about smaller ships).
My take on the Borg Queen, Hive Mind and Borg Collective trinity is that she indeed brings direction to what would otherwise be a perpetual parliament level chaotic debate on what to do now.
2. The Borg don't choose anything, the Queen does. She is not confined to a body, or she would not have had a conversation with Picard about things that happened on the cube that got destroyed in Best of Both Worlds, which destroyed that body along with it.
Given the Queen's response to Picard, she clearly time traveled her way out of Best of Both Worlds's event. "You think in such three-dimensional terms. How small you've become."
Everyone knows the first three Newtonian dimensions. However, according to modern physic, the fourth dimension is time (or the progress in time).
PS, you have a strange definition of "abusing time travel" as time travel has appeared in nearly every season of every Trek series, and multiple films before the 1 time it happened in the Kelvin Timeline films. That isn't even counting the fact that the film.actually used it in accordance with an actual time travel theory which was a first for the franchise.
From an artistic point of view, JJ's way of using time travel to "jump the shark" is on the same level as using "Thank God, it was just a dream!" in Dallas in the 70's. In the franchise, time travel was always used as a tool to make the story telling move forward, creatively. JJ rather used it to go ballistic, and go tabula rasa, and tried to erase cannon so that he could recreate Star Trek from scratches the way he wanted. That's clearly being destructive, unlike how it had been used so far in the 50ish years Star Trek existed at that point.
ONE CUBE is supposed to be a threat to 39 ships, dammit.
To quote Mirror Tilly, "That's an understatement. Of epic proportion!". First Borg attack at Wolf 359 destroyed 39 ships at that battle alone, but she had been on a rampage all her way to Wolf 359, and kept it going afterwards. Counting smaller ships, we're clearly taking about well over 100 vessels lost! Second Borg attack, in First Contact , comprised of THREE battles. First engagement, the Battle of the Typhon Expanse Sector, was only depicted through comm traffic. The Cube dropped out of warp, punched her way through the blockade, and resumed her course and speed towards Earth. Second battle was the "Glorious" Battle of Sector 001. Third was the Enterprise-E vs Queen's Sphere in the past. As Admiral Hayes tells Picard at the begining of FC, the Queen's Cube was already on a rampage on her way, destroying anything in her wake. According to Memory Alpha, 20 ships out of 30 we destroyed during the Battle of Sector 001 alone. That means that there's no telling how many were lost in the Typhon expanse, nor before that point. According to the comm traffic, Battle of the Typhon Expanse Sector was just as much as a blood bath, with ships sustaining heavy damages in the first seconds of the battle.
This might have been a valid argument if people actually bothered to learn from their failures back when TFOs had fail conditions. They didn't, instead it just lead to a large stream of constantly failed TFOs.
Seeing how people (and players running botting scripts) perform poorly in Azure Nebula Rescue, and how people desert TFO's the second their bad advices are ignored or the secondary conditions are failed because the actual team formed aren't high DPS's, I second that 110%! I have no problems with missions with (reasonable) failure triggers, but it's unreasonable to have those in TFO the way TFO's are at the moment. Especially not when dealing with FTFO!
Personally, I've only seen teams do badly on Azure Nebula when the RNG makes it impossible to get enough points to complete the optional in the first place.
Likewise, I rarely see people outright desert TFOs anymore. Most modern TFOs actually have a decent reward structure so you can fail some optionals, and still make a decent amount of marks.
Couple weeks ago, I was grinding the MACO ground sets on three different toons, as well as the KHG on a KDF toon. I admit: I don't have a life. I ran "Infected: The Conduit" well over 100 times. I lost track how many times I saw people desert the very second the secondary condition was failed. I also noticed it in "Crystalline Catastrophe", also when the secondary condition are failed. Those players seem under the false idea that the daily bonus would be percentage based, while it's actually a flat number, 60 (plus applicable bonuses).
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
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.'
From an artistic point of view, JJ's way of using time travel to "jump the shark" is on the same level as using "Thank God, it was just a dream!" in Dallas in the 70's. In the franchise, time travel was always used as a tool to make the story telling move forward, creatively. JJ rather used it to go ballistic, and go tabula rasa, and tried to erase cannon so that he could recreate Star Trek from scratches the way he wanted. That's clearly being destructive, unlike how it had been used so far in the 50ish years Star Trek existed at that point.
it is only your point of view.
here is mine : He didn't try to erase the canon stuff, he was just stuck by all this canon nonsense, so he just made a reboot using a temporal trick, and if he created this reboot, it is also for the new generations who don't know Star trek. STO and Discovery are full of temporal tricks to hide the flaws in the storyline or when the story is stuck (Iconian in STO for example). The temporal crazyness in Discovery doesn't serve the story, but demonstrate the lack of imagination of the scriptwriters.
That's super unfortunate, I got randomed into Infected a few times in the past couple days, lost the optional once or twice, but didn't have anyone leave. Can't say I had the same experience in CCA, then again, I don't think ive seen the CCA optionals fail in months.
Not sure if you've been lucky or I've been unlucky then. I usually play during the evening or in the night so it may impact which part of the player base we run into.
it is only your point of view.
here is mine : He didn't try to erase the canon stuff, he was just stuck by all this canon nonsense, so he just made a reboot using a temporal trick, and if he created this reboot, it is also for the new generations who don't know Star trek. STO and Discovery are full of temporal tricks to hide the flaws in the storyline or when the story is stuck (Iconian in STO for example). The temporal crazyness in Discovery doesn't serve the story, but demonstrate the lack of imagination of the scriptwriters.
"it is only your point of view" Here's a fact: His reboots are dead. Shelved; officially dead. And it seriously endangered any future Star Trek movie project. If his reboot would have been any good, they wouldn't have been epic unprofitable. The studio wanted to lower the allocated budget for JJ movies IV, V and VI, but JJ, Pine and Quinto all were asking for the budget to be increased even if the studio hadn't made any profit in the first three titles. So they pulled the plug, and blamed Trekers for being short sighted for not liking the reboot.
I'm not a fan of TRIBBLE/DSC, so I can't comment too deep on it, but I agree with you that nowadays temporal manipulations is wwaaayyy abused by writers lacking imagination, long term vision and general talent. Notable other examples include X-Men (though they had quite a challenge in coping up with that dismal third movie, and post Logan projects include both X23-X24 future and yet again include timeline manipulation to reboot the original set of characters), the initial Star Wars Ep. 7 project., and Terminator: Genesys (Initially a franchise set in the present with character from the future, but now a needlessly overly complicated story with a second set of character from the futures set before hand to neutralise the initial set of characters and then set a new timeline so that they can reach the future on their own to then send a third set of new characters to alter the timeline even more?!?).
From an artistic point of view, JJ's way of using time travel to "jump the shark" is on the same level as using "Thank God, it was just a dream!" in Dallas in the 70's. In the franchise, time travel was always used as a tool to make the story telling move forward, creatively. JJ rather used it to go ballistic, and go tabula rasa, and tried to erase cannon so that he could recreate Star Trek from scratches the way he wanted. That's clearly being destructive, unlike how it had been used so far in the 50ish years Star Trek existed at that point.
it is only your point of view.
here is mine : He didn't try to erase the canon stuff, he was just stuck by all this canon nonsense, so he just made a reboot using a temporal trick, and if he created this reboot, it is also for the new generations who don't know Star trek. STO and Discovery are full of temporal tricks to hide the flaws in the storyline or when the story is stuck (Iconian in STO for example). The temporal crazyness in Discovery doesn't serve the story, but demonstrate the lack of imagination of the scriptwriters.
I don't see your reasoning here at all. You say that JJ "didn't try to erase the canon stuff, he was just stuck by all this canon nonsense" and therefore give the Kelvin Timeline something of a free pass.
Lets put it this way - a slight rewording of your post:
Discovery didn't try to erase the canon stuff, they were just stuck by all this canon nonsense; it is also for the new generations who don't know Star trek. STO and the Kelvin Timeline are full of temporal tricks to hide the flaws in the storyline or when the story is stuck (Iconian in STO for example). The temporal crazyness in the Kelvin Timeline doesn't serve the story, but demonstrate the lack of imagination of the scriptwriters.
Works both ways. And this is better disucssed elsewhere as is derailing the thread.
nope, that doesn't work both ways, take a look at discovery: there are 1 temporal stone, a temporal costume etc, oh! surprise created by burnham's mother (technology forgotten later lol). I have maybe forgotten an other temporal trick somewhere. In the kelvin timeline (movies), there is only 1 trick, just to launch the story.
I agree, it is not the place to discuss about discovery etc. You like Discovery, and in my humble opinion, the scriptwriters are not good at all.
no thx, there is no need for a discussion about this subject
About Defera: maybe that would be a good idea to move the borg invasion elsewhere; the defera zone exist since maybe the launch of the game (I don't know), and this zone is outdated and worse far away from the borg space. A new borg invasion zone close to their controlled space would be more logical.
The defera zone brings 1 question: why the borg want fanatically assimilate the deferi and not the other systems which surround defera?
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
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.'
no thx, there is no need for a discussion about this subject
About Defera: maybe that would be a good idea to move the borg invasion elsewhere; the defera zone exist since maybe the launch of the game (I don't know), and this zone is outdated and worse far away from the borg space. A new borg invasion zone close to their controlled space would be more logical.
The defera zone brings 1 question: why the borg want fanatically assimilate the deferi and not the other systems which surround defera?
They detected the Preserver archive and are trying to acquire Preserver tech.
Remaster the original story driven STF missions. Lessen the difficulty and slot them into the Borg story arc. This way, those of us that were around and actually enjoyed them with friends/fleetmates can have a bit of nostalgia and the newer players can get a taste of the missions before queueing up for the TFO.
no thx, there is no need for a discussion about this subject
About Defera: maybe that would be a good idea to move the borg invasion elsewhere; the defera zone exist since maybe the launch of the game (I don't know), and this zone is outdated and worse far away from the borg space. A new borg invasion zone close to their controlled space would be more logical.
The defera zone brings 1 question: why the borg want fanatically assimilate the deferi and not the other systems which surround defera?
They detected the Preserver archive and are trying to acquire Preserver tech.
oh! yes, I forgot that; but the most interesting stuff were destroyed by the Iconian on the planet where the preservers were "stored"?
no thx, there is no need for a discussion about this subject
About Defera: maybe that would be a good idea to move the borg invasion elsewhere; the defera zone exist since maybe the launch of the game (I don't know), and this zone is outdated and worse far away from the borg space. A new borg invasion zone close to their controlled space would be more logical.
The defera zone brings 1 question: why the borg want fanatically assimilate the deferi and not the other systems which surround defera?
They detected the Preserver archive and are trying to acquire Preserver tech.
oh! yes, I forgot that; but the most interesting stuff were destroyed by the Iconian on the planet where the preservers were "stored"?
The good one was over there, but there's some tech at Defera too.
Seeing how people (and players running botting scripts) perform poorly in Azure Nebula Rescue, and how people desert TFO's the second their bad advices are ignored or the secondary conditions are failed because the actual team formed aren't high DPS's, I second that 110%! I have no problems with missions with (reasonable) failure triggers, but it's unreasonable to have those in TFO the way TFO's are at the moment. Especially not when dealing with FTFO!
Personally, I've only seen teams do badly on Azure Nebula when the RNG makes it impossible to get enough points to complete the optional in the first place. Likewise, I rarely see people outright desert TFOs anymore. Most modern TFOs actually have a decent reward structure so you can fail some optionals, and still make a decent amount of marks.
Hard fail conditions are a typically lazy style of game design. Good game design has missions adapt to objective failure, or have objectives that could logically be failed, and the mission still continue, and have reward payouts that reflect how many of the objectives you managed to complete.
Operation Riposte is a great example of adaptive/scaling rewards/mission structure.
For me most modern TFO’s have a terrible reward structure where you can often sleep though them worse than ISA and still get near max or in some cases max reward for doing nothing. The new TFO’s with removing fail conditions and turning them into auto win-auto handout is very poor design that lowers the feeling of reward and accomplishment which in turn means the modern TFO’s give me less satisfaction to play. So overall I find them a much worse design.
Not all of them mind you, The Swarm is good its just the very badly designed modern ones outnumber rare good ones.
Hard fail conditions are not lazy game design when done correctly they are great and are massively more rewarding to play then the ones without any fail conditions. What is lazy game design is having adv/Elite that are impossible to fail, always hand out a reward no matter how badly you play. If you sleep though something you should fail. Normal is fine without hard fail conditions but the point of adv and Elite is it takes more effort and skill to play and can be failed which in turn that makes them better and more rewarding to play.
So many people I know including an entire fleet left the game partly due to these modern auto win - auto handout rubbish missions without fail conditions. A lot of the modern TFO's and modern revamps have hurt the game in my mind. Far to many of the revamps have been made worse then what we had before. I just hope the new Borg ones are not like the other revamps.
Seeing how people (and players running botting scripts) perform poorly in Azure Nebula Rescue, and how people desert TFO's the second their bad advices are ignored or the secondary conditions are failed because the actual team formed aren't high DPS's, I second that 110%! I have no problems with missions with (reasonable) failure triggers, but it's unreasonable to have those in TFO the way TFO's are at the moment. Especially not when dealing with FTFO!
Personally, I've only seen teams do badly on Azure Nebula when the RNG makes it impossible to get enough points to complete the optional in the first place. Likewise, I rarely see people outright desert TFOs anymore. Most modern TFOs actually have a decent reward structure so you can fail some optionals, and still make a decent amount of marks.
Hard fail conditions are a typically lazy style of game design. Good game design has missions adapt to objective failure, or have objectives that could logically be failed, and the mission still continue, and have reward payouts that reflect how many of the objectives you managed to complete.
Operation Riposte is a great example of adaptive/scaling rewards/mission structure.
For me most modern TFO’s have a terrible reward structure where you can often sleep though them worse than ISA and still get near max or in some cases max reward for doing nothing. The new TFO’s with removing fail conditions and turning them into auto win-auto handout is very poor design that lowers the feeling of reward and accomplishment which in turn means the modern TFO’s give me less satisfaction to play. So overall I find them a much worse design.
Not all of them mind you, The Swarm is good its just the very badly designed modern ones outnumber rare good ones.
Hard fail conditions are not lazy game design when done correctly they are great and are massively more rewarding to play then the ones without any fail conditions. What is lazy game design is having adv/Elite that are impossible to fail, always hand out a reward no matter how badly you play. If you sleep though something you should fail. Normal is fine without hard fail conditions but the point of adv and Elite is it takes more effort and skill to play and can be failed which in turn that makes them better and more rewarding to play.
So many people I know including an entire fleet left the game partly due to these modern auto win - auto handout rubbish missions without fail conditions. A lot of the modern TFO's and modern revamps have hurt the game in my mind. Far to many of the revamps have been made worse then what we had before. I just hope the new Borg ones are not like the other revamps.
Yeah. Not to mention, the rewards for non-event TFOs are all generic currency that players either don't need because the game is so easy, that are better acquired somewhere else, or both.
Never mind Preserver tech - there is a friggin Dyson Sphere, capable of producing Omega Molecules (which the Borg have a standing directive to "assmiliate at any cost" ), sat in their back yard!
We don't actually know for sure that the Jenolan Dyson Sphere is still capable of producing it's own Omega molecule, and didn't simply teleport using "whatever was left" in her "fuel tank". Keep in mind that it had been in Federation space for centuries, and never triggered an "Omega Alert" when explored by Federation scientist.
However, I see your point: the Solanae Dyson should have been raided, especially since it's still within reasonable traveling distance from Borg territory. the Borg has to be aware of it's existence, given the large number of Alliance's resources dedicated and that the Borg only need to assimilate a single individual (even with indirect knowledge) to learn its existence. Instead, we see Borg converging literally in the middle of nowhere (assimilating space dust?) during Red Alerts.
Never mind Preserver tech - there is a friggin Dyson Sphere, capable of producing Omega Molecules (which the Borg have a standing directive to "assmiliate at any cost" ), sat in their back yard!
We don't actually know for sure that the Jenolan Dyson Sphere is still capable of producing it's own Omega molecule, and didn't simply teleport using "whatever was left" in her "fuel tank". Keep in mind that it had been in Federation space for centuries, and never triggered an "Omega Alert" when explored by Federation scientist.
However, I see your point: the Solanae Dyson should have been raided, especially since it's still within reasonable traveling distance from Borg territory. the Borg has to be aware of it's existence, given the large number of Alliance's resources dedicated and that the Borg only need to assimilate a single individual (even with indirect knowledge) to learn its existence. Instead, we see Borg converging literally in the middle of nowhere (assimilating space dust?) during Red Alerts.
True, although the Jenolan sphere does contain a gateway that connects to the Solanae sphere and if a Borg ship did enter the sphere its questionable whether or not the Alliance could close that gate quickly enough to stop said ship entering (with the fact that Elachi Alert shows us that whilst closing a Gateway is possible, its a relatively slow process requiring several Starships).
Very interesting, especially since a Cube has a crew complement of 30k and can transport up to 2M drones. That would quickly turn the tide of the Voth ground battle zone!
Never mind Preserver tech - there is a friggin Dyson Sphere, capable of producing Omega Molecules (which the Borg have a standing directive to "assmiliate at any cost" ), sat in their back yard!
We don't actually know for sure that the Jenolan Dyson Sphere is still capable of producing it's own Omega molecule, and didn't simply teleport using "whatever was left" in her "fuel tank". Keep in mind that it had been in Federation space for centuries, and never triggered an "Omega Alert" when explored by Federation scientist.
However, I see your point: the Solanae Dyson should have been raided, especially since it's still within reasonable traveling distance from Borg territory. the Borg has to be aware of it's existence, given the large number of Alliance's resources dedicated and that the Borg only need to assimilate a single individual (even with indirect knowledge) to learn its existence. Instead, we see Borg converging literally in the middle of nowhere (assimilating space dust?) during Red Alerts.
True, although the Jenolan sphere does contain a gateway that connects to the Solanae sphere and if a Borg ship did enter the sphere its questionable whether or not the Alliance could close that gate quickly enough to stop said ship entering (with the fact that Elachi Alert shows us that whilst closing a Gateway is possible, its a relatively slow process requiring several Starships).
“The vast majority of the mark reward is based on player performance, and completing objectives. The base reward is a minimum of the total possible.”
The marks are something I only see as a secondary reward which I don’t care about. The main rewards don’t change and your kind of missing the point. It’s not the mark rewards that give a satisfying and enjoyable play expreince. Many of us find those missions where you automatedly succeed and automatically get a reward even with no to little effort give no feeling of reward or of accomplishment because you can just sleep walk though them and still succeed.
For some of us having a hard fail condition done correctly increases the feeling of reward, increases the feeling of accomplishment and makes the mission give a more satisfying play expreince. Which is why I see the new TFO’s* as so badly designed and far less satisfying to play then the older content that requires more effort.
(* there are exceptions, not all new content is bad)
“The kind of system you suggest has been railed against in gaming for over a decade, because of how not rewarding it is by design.”
Your completely out of touch. Steam has exploded in recent years with games designed around this style of gameplay I am talking about. It’s been extremely popular in the past few years and loved by gamers shown by the large resurgence. All because of how rewarding that design is to play the very opposite to what you say. Games based around hard fails are at an all-time popularity high with entre categories on Steam built around it because of how much it’s taken off in the past few years. Granted it’s not a style for everyone but to say its something railing against just shows how out of touch you are.
“Also, you don't auto win anything. An auto win would imply getting full rewards for something you fail, which you demonstrably don't. Lying about something so basic doesn't help your case.”
First of all I am not lying I even gave you an example Defence of Star Base 1 where you can get max rewards for doing nothing.
As for auto win, auto handout we have been down this road before. Auto win does not imply or mean max rewards. There is winning a mission and failing a mission with completely different rewards and messages. Auto win-auto handout means no matter what you do, no matter how little effort, you succeed in the mission and get given a reward. Succeed doesn’t mean max reward, succeed means you complete and pass the mission with a reward without the mission failing. That is very bad TFO design and its how many of the new ones are design. Worse its how all events are now which sucks all the fun and enjoyment out of the events. Its flat-out bad design.
You say you hate ISA because of the lack of effort needed yet most of those new TFO’s can be succeeded with even less effort then ISA. Take Dissension which you highly prize as well designed. You can put in less effort then ISA and still pass the Dissension TFO. What I mean is in Dissension you can just sleep walk until the boss with no or next to no effort, kill the boss fight without any effort and succeed in the mission getting the main rewards with only a minor lose in some minor marks. Dissension represents everything bad about the new TFO designs although its not as bad as the others. Defend SB1 is much worse.
There is more to playing TFO’s then marks. I find a mission that can fail and you have to put effort to pass, is far more rewarding, satisfying to play and has a better feeling of accomplishment then a new TFO where its impossible to fail where you automatic succeed no matter what and automatic get a reward no matter what. That is why I find the new TFO bad design.
I am not against scaling rewards but at least for Advanced/Elite the bottom end of scaling should not be auto succeed, auto reward handout. This goes double for events. I used to love looking forward to Events. But now all events are Auto win-auto handout impossible to fail and so they feel pointless to play. No matter what you do you get the main reward even if you put in less effort then an ISA run.
So I really hope the new Elite Borg TFO’s don’t follow this dreadful auto win nonsense the other TFOs do.
EDIT: ISE is loads of fun. Way to go devs you got it right.
EDIT2: Into the Hive Elite though needs a lot of work. Far to easy and to many pointless time gates that ruin the fun.
It's really saying something STO is easier than those idle clicker mobile games. I mean, idle clicker characters move and fight by themselves, but at least you need to grind (or buy) enough levels and gear to kill the enemy with. Whereas STO not only calibrates all content to be winnable by the lowest common denominator, but actually hands out free wins for everyone just by waiting out the timer.
The system matters. You can't argue for fail conditions without the system for how they work. I've already said it here, but it needs repeated.
The original STFs had fail conditions. If you messed up, the map reset. You didn't get kicked out, you didn't get a time out, you just had to do it again until you got it right. That worked, it made them take a lot longer sometimes, but you weren't punished for making a mistake with more than the time it takes to do it right. You had the chance to regroup, go over strategy, and try again.
On the other hand, the fail conditions of a few years ago were idiotic. There was nothing good about them because at the simplest view, failing meant game over, you lose, have a time out and if you even knew why it failed, good, if not, too bad, you don't get to learn why. There is no retry, no strategy, no learning from failure, it was just a kick and a total waste of your time.
This is without even going into the specific nature of each queue and its failure conditions. Once you do that you have major design failures with Azure Nebula Rescue and ISA, for example. Azure still has the problem where it can be completely impossible to achieve the optionals through no fault of any player, but back during days of fail, that was the failure condition.
ISA has the other issue with fail conditions: trolls. When the standard practice is to kill cube, go left, and one person goes right and starts blowing up stuff and can't handle the nanite spheres, well there was a fail before you even realize something is wrong. One player put the rest of the team on timeout, totally wasting their time because they wanted to be jerks, didn't know the queue, or whatever. That is not acceptable design of failure conditions.
Probably most frustrating of all is that in pointing out the severe failures of the fail conditions, the people who wanted them could not conceive of changing them or even acknowledge the severe problems with how they were implemented, because to them it was a binary, either they exist as they are or they don't exist at all. So instead of fixing the queues and the system, they just got removed.
You can't just argue for a wide reaching system fundamentally altering how people play the game without going into details of how it works, just like real life. If you don't know how to implement it beyond wishful thinking of some weird ideal, then why should it be done? It is already clear Cryptic didn't know how to do fail conditions well. If you want them back you really need to do more than just wish for fail conditions, but come up with a better system and go into the details of how it should work on each queue.
Just did the event ISN. Sigh. It's just the same really, but now with big red markers on the nanite transformer regenerators. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."
“The problem with this argument is that TFOs like ISA require the least effort of any TFO in the game, so by your own logic, they should be the least rewarding. Whereas TFOs like Operation Riposte, and Pahvo Dissension, which require significantly more work to get max rewards should be more rewarding, because you have to put more effort into them.
You claim to want challenging content, where you have a higher chance of not getting the reward, but then prop up the least challenging content in the game, with the lowest chance of not getting the max reward.”
ISE doesn’t require the least effort and is not the least challenging content in game. I have to put effort in to get the main reward + event reward. Whiles Pahvo Dissension you can just sleep though with zero effort, kill the boss battle in a matter of seconds and get the main reward for massively less effort then ISE or even ISA.
Just compare running ISE for the event compared to Dissension for that event. ISE takes effort, Dissension is effortless with auto handout-auto win. Dissension is so effortless the entire team can go AFK, walk away from the computer apart from a handful of seconds and still get the main event reward. That is just bad design.
Your still kind of missing the point. When I say feeling of reward for playing the mission, I am not talking about mark rewards.
“The idea that you could even begin to compare games like that to ISA shows how out of touch YOU are. If the people who played those games saw what you had to do for something like Infected Space they would yawn because of how boring and mindless it is. ISA, and the TFOs like it, are so mindless, thoughtless, and effortless, you could literally make a BOT to run them, because of how little human action they require to complete.”
The funny thing is the so called modern TFO’s you are saying are better take even less effort and are more mindless, thoughtless then ISE. You don’t even need a bot to run the modern TFO’s like Dissension or Star Base Defence they are so effortless.
Now who is lying? It has been proven to you time and time again that you 100% can. Then again you have been proven wrong about your DPS comments time and time again and you still pretend otherwise.
“In ISA, all you need to do to win is move forward, then move left, then move right, all while having the spacebar taped down.”
Completely incorrect especially for my build and especially for ISE.
“In something like Pahvo Dissension,”
All you need to is watch a pointless timer go down, move forward even less then ISA then shoot for a few seconds even less then ISA and you get the main rewards plus pass the mission.
Or if you want a little extra secondary minor reward 2 of you move left, 3 of you move right until you meet up in the middle like ISA. Tap spacebar and F a few times and it’s over. There is nothing remotely complex about the corridor single lane one at a time Pahvo Dissension. Its massively easier and less effort then ISE.
“And this is really what it comes down to isn't it? You don't like the new TFOs because you can't just auto win by having high DPS,”
How can you still not get this, you are completely wrong again. I don’t like the new TFO’s because you don’t need to work as a team to complete it. You just auto win with auto reward even with zero effort, low or zero DPS. That’s why they are badly designed. DPS is irrelevant high or low DPS, you auto win many of the new TFO's reguardless of DPS.
Luckily the devs listened and the new Borg space maps are not like the badly designed TFO’s you keep going on about. on Elite the new Borg space maps are fun, good and well designed.
Comments
Don't everyone using diplomacy do?
Voyager was merely an amusement/annoyance for them, not worthy to vest more resources. Only in Dark Frontier, they assimilated two worlds, adding 300M individual to their collective. Think of it with cold hard logic: Would you waste tons of resources on a single ship your expert opinion says isn't a real threat and lose countless conquest opportunities or would you ignore that single little ship with 248 life forms (including Neelix!) and dedicate your resources to most efficient endeavours? The Borg clearly did the later.
You clearly forget:
- in Drone, as One actively sabotages the Sphere, near the end, the Hivemind is clearly heard begging for its life;
- in Dark Frontier, pt 2, when the Queen was "plugged in" on Seven, and experienced emotions, to then release the tractor beam hold hence sparing that last ship with 3 lifeforms;
- in Unimatrix Zero, pt 2, the Queen comes face to face with the little boy ("still in maturation chamber", according to Seven). Not only the Queen could have overpowered him on the spot (meaning he would obviously have subsequently been killed in real life, like the dozen of beheaded drones seen multiple times in the Queen's chamber in Unimatrix 1), but she talked with him and toured Unimatrix Zero. However, even off screen, she didn't kill said little boy, as he's subsequently seen in the episode. To me, not killing/assimilating children for emotional reason does not fit Borg's MO, that normally put all this kids in maturating chamber after initiating their assimilation. About 20 kids were depicted accordingly so far in the franchise.
I am unconvinced by that. I really doubt that each and single Borg ship has a Queen chamber and Queen body. Remember that the first actual Queen chamber depicted in Voyager formed a single sizable ship in Dark Frontier (the Octahedron, also depicted ingame). I assume that both her unique shape and design meant she was mostly composed of extensive communication tech. She was just a bit smaller than her two Cubes escorts. I seriously doubt that the Borg would dedicate/waste about 80% of the space on every single Cube (forget about smaller ships).My take on the Borg Queen, Hive Mind and Borg Collective trinity is that she indeed brings direction to what would otherwise be a perpetual parliament level chaotic debate on what to do now.
Given the Queen's response to Picard, she clearly time traveled her way out of Best of Both Worlds's event. "You think in such three-dimensional terms. How small you've become."
Everyone knows the first three Newtonian dimensions. However, according to modern physic, the fourth dimension is time (or the progress in time).
From an artistic point of view, JJ's way of using time travel to "jump the shark" is on the same level as using "Thank God, it was just a dream!" in Dallas in the 70's. In the franchise, time travel was always used as a tool to make the story telling move forward, creatively. JJ rather used it to go ballistic, and go tabula rasa, and tried to erase cannon so that he could recreate Star Trek from scratches the way he wanted. That's clearly being destructive, unlike how it had been used so far in the 50ish years Star Trek existed at that point.
To quote Mirror Tilly, "That's an understatement. Of epic proportion!". First Borg attack at Wolf 359 destroyed 39 ships at that battle alone, but she had been on a rampage all her way to Wolf 359, and kept it going afterwards. Counting smaller ships, we're clearly taking about well over 100 vessels lost! Second Borg attack, in First Contact , comprised of THREE battles. First engagement, the Battle of the Typhon Expanse Sector, was only depicted through comm traffic. The Cube dropped out of warp, punched her way through the blockade, and resumed her course and speed towards Earth. Second battle was the "Glorious" Battle of Sector 001. Third was the Enterprise-E vs Queen's Sphere in the past. As Admiral Hayes tells Picard at the begining of FC, the Queen's Cube was already on a rampage on her way, destroying anything in her wake. According to Memory Alpha, 20 ships out of 30 we destroyed during the Battle of Sector 001 alone. That means that there's no telling how many were lost in the Typhon expanse, nor before that point. According to the comm traffic, Battle of the Typhon Expanse Sector was just as much as a blood bath, with ships sustaining heavy damages in the first seconds of the battle.
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.'
it is only your point of view.
here is mine : He didn't try to erase the canon stuff, he was just stuck by all this canon nonsense, so he just made a reboot using a temporal trick, and if he created this reboot, it is also for the new generations who don't know Star trek. STO and Discovery are full of temporal tricks to hide the flaws in the storyline or when the story is stuck (Iconian in STO for example). The temporal crazyness in Discovery doesn't serve the story, but demonstrate the lack of imagination of the scriptwriters.
I'm not a fan of TRIBBLE/DSC, so I can't comment too deep on it, but I agree with you that nowadays temporal manipulations is wwaaayyy abused by writers lacking imagination, long term vision and general talent. Notable other examples include X-Men (though they had quite a challenge in coping up with that dismal third movie, and post Logan projects include both X23-X24 future and yet again include timeline manipulation to reboot the original set of characters), the initial Star Wars Ep. 7 project., and Terminator: Genesys (Initially a franchise set in the present with character from the future, but now a needlessly overly complicated story with a second set of character from the futures set before hand to neutralise the initial set of characters and then set a new timeline so that they can reach the future on their own to then send a third set of new characters to alter the timeline even more?!?).
nope, that doesn't work both ways, take a look at discovery: there are 1 temporal stone, a temporal costume etc, oh! surprise created by burnham's mother (technology forgotten later lol). I have maybe forgotten an other temporal trick somewhere. In the kelvin timeline (movies), there is only 1 trick, just to launch the story.
I agree, it is not the place to discuss about discovery etc. You like Discovery, and in my humble opinion, the scriptwriters are not good at all.
About Defera: maybe that would be a good idea to move the borg invasion elsewhere; the defera zone exist since maybe the launch of the game (I don't know), and this zone is outdated and worse far away from the borg space. A new borg invasion zone close to their controlled space would be more logical.
The defera zone brings 1 question: why the borg want fanatically assimilate the deferi and not the other systems which surround defera?
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.'
My character Tsin'xing
Remaster the original story driven STF missions. Lessen the difficulty and slot them into the Borg story arc. This way, those of us that were around and actually enjoyed them with friends/fleetmates can have a bit of nostalgia and the newer players can get a taste of the missions before queueing up for the TFO.
oh! yes, I forgot that; but the most interesting stuff were destroyed by the Iconian on the planet where the preservers were "stored"?
if only devs could read this sentence
My character Tsin'xing
Not all of them mind you, The Swarm is good its just the very badly designed modern ones outnumber rare good ones.
Hard fail conditions are not lazy game design when done correctly they are great and are massively more rewarding to play then the ones without any fail conditions. What is lazy game design is having adv/Elite that are impossible to fail, always hand out a reward no matter how badly you play. If you sleep though something you should fail. Normal is fine without hard fail conditions but the point of adv and Elite is it takes more effort and skill to play and can be failed which in turn that makes them better and more rewarding to play.
So many people I know including an entire fleet left the game partly due to these modern auto win - auto handout rubbish missions without fail conditions. A lot of the modern TFO's and modern revamps have hurt the game in my mind. Far to many of the revamps have been made worse then what we had before. I just hope the new Borg ones are not like the other revamps.
However, I see your point: the Solanae Dyson should have been raided, especially since it's still within reasonable traveling distance from Borg territory. the Borg has to be aware of it's existence, given the large number of Alliance's resources dedicated and that the Borg only need to assimilate a single individual (even with indirect knowledge) to learn its existence. Instead, we see Borg converging literally in the middle of nowhere (assimilating space dust?) during Red Alerts.
For some of us having a hard fail condition done correctly increases the feeling of reward, increases the feeling of accomplishment and makes the mission give a more satisfying play expreince. Which is why I see the new TFO’s* as so badly designed and far less satisfying to play then the older content that requires more effort.
(* there are exceptions, not all new content is bad)
Your completely out of touch. Steam has exploded in recent years with games designed around this style of gameplay I am talking about. It’s been extremely popular in the past few years and loved by gamers shown by the large resurgence. All because of how rewarding that design is to play the very opposite to what you say. Games based around hard fails are at an all-time popularity high with entre categories on Steam built around it because of how much it’s taken off in the past few years. Granted it’s not a style for everyone but to say its something railing against just shows how out of touch you are.
First of all I am not lying I even gave you an example Defence of Star Base 1 where you can get max rewards for doing nothing.
As for auto win, auto handout we have been down this road before. Auto win does not imply or mean max rewards. There is winning a mission and failing a mission with completely different rewards and messages. Auto win-auto handout means no matter what you do, no matter how little effort, you succeed in the mission and get given a reward. Succeed doesn’t mean max reward, succeed means you complete and pass the mission with a reward without the mission failing. That is very bad TFO design and its how many of the new ones are design. Worse its how all events are now which sucks all the fun and enjoyment out of the events. Its flat-out bad design.
You say you hate ISA because of the lack of effort needed yet most of those new TFO’s can be succeeded with even less effort then ISA. Take Dissension which you highly prize as well designed. You can put in less effort then ISA and still pass the Dissension TFO. What I mean is in Dissension you can just sleep walk until the boss with no or next to no effort, kill the boss fight without any effort and succeed in the mission getting the main rewards with only a minor lose in some minor marks. Dissension represents everything bad about the new TFO designs although its not as bad as the others. Defend SB1 is much worse.
There is more to playing TFO’s then marks. I find a mission that can fail and you have to put effort to pass, is far more rewarding, satisfying to play and has a better feeling of accomplishment then a new TFO where its impossible to fail where you automatic succeed no matter what and automatic get a reward no matter what. That is why I find the new TFO bad design.
I am not against scaling rewards but at least for Advanced/Elite the bottom end of scaling should not be auto succeed, auto reward handout. This goes double for events. I used to love looking forward to Events. But now all events are Auto win-auto handout impossible to fail and so they feel pointless to play. No matter what you do you get the main reward even if you put in less effort then an ISA run.
So I really hope the new Elite Borg TFO’s don’t follow this dreadful auto win nonsense the other TFOs do.
EDIT: ISE is loads of fun. Way to go devs you got it right.
EDIT2: Into the Hive Elite though needs a lot of work. Far to easy and to many pointless time gates that ruin the fun.
The original STFs had fail conditions. If you messed up, the map reset. You didn't get kicked out, you didn't get a time out, you just had to do it again until you got it right. That worked, it made them take a lot longer sometimes, but you weren't punished for making a mistake with more than the time it takes to do it right. You had the chance to regroup, go over strategy, and try again.
On the other hand, the fail conditions of a few years ago were idiotic. There was nothing good about them because at the simplest view, failing meant game over, you lose, have a time out and if you even knew why it failed, good, if not, too bad, you don't get to learn why. There is no retry, no strategy, no learning from failure, it was just a kick and a total waste of your time.
This is without even going into the specific nature of each queue and its failure conditions. Once you do that you have major design failures with Azure Nebula Rescue and ISA, for example. Azure still has the problem where it can be completely impossible to achieve the optionals through no fault of any player, but back during days of fail, that was the failure condition.
ISA has the other issue with fail conditions: trolls. When the standard practice is to kill cube, go left, and one person goes right and starts blowing up stuff and can't handle the nanite spheres, well there was a fail before you even realize something is wrong. One player put the rest of the team on timeout, totally wasting their time because they wanted to be jerks, didn't know the queue, or whatever. That is not acceptable design of failure conditions.
Probably most frustrating of all is that in pointing out the severe failures of the fail conditions, the people who wanted them could not conceive of changing them or even acknowledge the severe problems with how they were implemented, because to them it was a binary, either they exist as they are or they don't exist at all. So instead of fixing the queues and the system, they just got removed.
You can't just argue for a wide reaching system fundamentally altering how people play the game without going into details of how it works, just like real life. If you don't know how to implement it beyond wishful thinking of some weird ideal, then why should it be done? It is already clear Cryptic didn't know how to do fail conditions well. If you want them back you really need to do more than just wish for fail conditions, but come up with a better system and go into the details of how it should work on each queue.
Just compare running ISE for the event compared to Dissension for that event. ISE takes effort, Dissension is effortless with auto handout-auto win. Dissension is so effortless the entire team can go AFK, walk away from the computer apart from a handful of seconds and still get the main event reward. That is just bad design.
Your still kind of missing the point. When I say feeling of reward for playing the mission, I am not talking about mark rewards.
The funny thing is the so called modern TFO’s you are saying are better take even less effort and are more mindless, thoughtless then ISE. You don’t even need a bot to run the modern TFO’s like Dissension or Star Base Defence they are so effortless.
Now who is lying? It has been proven to you time and time again that you 100% can. Then again you have been proven wrong about your DPS comments time and time again and you still pretend otherwise.
Completely incorrect especially for my build and especially for ISE.
“In something like Pahvo Dissension,”
All you need to is watch a pointless timer go down, move forward even less then ISA then shoot for a few seconds even less then ISA and you get the main rewards plus pass the mission.
Or if you want a little extra secondary minor reward 2 of you move left, 3 of you move right until you meet up in the middle like ISA. Tap spacebar and F a few times and it’s over. There is nothing remotely complex about the corridor single lane one at a time Pahvo Dissension. Its massively easier and less effort then ISE.
How can you still not get this, you are completely wrong again. I don’t like the new TFO’s because you don’t need to work as a team to complete it. You just auto win with auto reward even with zero effort, low or zero DPS. That’s why they are badly designed. DPS is irrelevant high or low DPS, you auto win many of the new TFO's reguardless of DPS.
Luckily the devs listened and the new Borg space maps are not like the badly designed TFO’s you keep going on about. on Elite the new Borg space maps are fun, good and well designed.