Tomorrow: Endevour/Admiralty pass tokens will ONLY be available for dilithium

thegrandnagus1

https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/11495233-reroll-and-pass-with-dilithium!

Starting on 8/24/2021, players on PC may purchase these Tokens directly using Dilithium, at a price of 2,500 Dilithium apiece. This change is intended to appear on Console platforms on 9/8/2021.

Previously, players had a chance to earn these resources by engaging with their respective systems, as randomized rewards that were sometimes included with other earnings. This method of earning will be disabled as of the date that the new purchase method goes live.

Important note: starting tomorrow these items will ONLY be available for dilithium. There will no longer be available through the normal "free" means that you can currently(soon to be previously) get them in game.

Update1:

https://twitter.com/AmbassadorKael/status/1429921474693844992

Update2:

https://twitter.com/BorticusCryptic/status/1430202854321520644

https://twitter.com/BorticusCryptic/status/1430203116746514442

https://twitter.com/BorticusCryptic/status/1430204021629808652

Update3:

https://twitter.com/AmbassadorKael/status/1430264260643344386

https://twitter.com/BorticusCryptic/status/1430282634068848640

https://twitter.com/BorticusCryptic/status/1430282635801096192

https://twitter.com/BorticusCryptic/status/1430282637151662081

phoenixc#0738

Well, that is quite annoying.

I suppose it will act as a dil sink for those who just skip through admiralty to get dil vouchers or are OCD about doing everything in the game as quickly as possible, but all it will do for a lot of people (me included) is discourage the use of admiralty and endeavors somewhat which would not result in a dil sink at all, just a slowdown of those already slug-slow systems.

Instead of admiralty skips people will just use the "shuttle pass" trick of throwing a single shuttle or low-usefulness ship at an assignment that they don't want to bother with, which just slows progress by taking a slot plus the cooldown of the ship or shuttle used.

Same thing with endeavors, instead of playing until all of the dailies are done players will do the ones they want (along with the inevitable event) and quit for the day (unless of course they plan to do missions for a while) to wait for them to roll off and the next days endeavors show up (or longer in the case of the universal).

While it may force some hardcore dil farmers to spend a tiny bit more, it will also make the casual players even more casual and not spend quite as much time in the game.

keepcalmchiveon

phoenixc#0738 wrote: »

Well, that is quite annoying.

I suppose it will act as a dil sink for those who just skip through admiralty to get dil vouchers or are OCD about doing everything in the game as quickly as possible, but all it will do for a lot of people (me included) is discourage the use of admiralty and endeavors somewhat which would not result in a dil sink at all, just a slowdown of those already slug-slow systems.

Instead of admiralty skips people will just use the "shuttle pass" trick of throwing a single shuttle or low-usefulness ship at an assignment that they don't want to bother with, which just slows progress by taking a slot plus the cooldown of the ship or shuttle used.

Same thing with endeavors, instead of playing until all of the dailies are done players will do the ones they want (along with the inevitable event) and quit for the day (unless of course they plan to do missions for a while) to wait for them to roll off and the next days endeavors show up (or longer in the case of the universal).

While it may force some hardcore dil farmers to spend a tiny bit more, it will also make the casual players even more casual and not spend quite as much time in the game.

yes and no. honestly, im almost at 170. many times i skip them cause i dont want to do them. so no skin off my back really, or in this case, dil used.

i find this a decent rule to change out. sure, for those maxed it means little, for those with nada, it means a lot, but it also slows down overall progress so as to limit the amount of people and how fast they get to 600.

besides, they didnt say they would take away the tokens you have now.

peterconnorfirst

Will be interesting to see how big of an impact this has.

I rarely use those tokens but don’t know about the rest. If the sink works it’s great for me.

rattler2

Might be a good start. Not only that it would be a more sustainable sink than crafting ever was.

thegrandnagus1

Yeah, the admiralty thing won't effect me much. I have so many shuttles and low tier ships I can effectively "skip" any missions I don't want to get to the ones I do.

The endevour tokens are another matter. I've got about 30 of those banked, but once those run out it will basically cost a nickel to re-roll. I guess that's not much...but it will add up

fred26291#2759

Redacted

starcruiser#3423

That was one of my suggestions and glad they implemented it. 2500 sounds a bit steep and hopefully they would have a sale event to make this even better!

gaevsman

I agree is a nice thing and a start, and also agree that is overprized... they should cost 1000 dill, why??, because you are more prone to spend 1000, as "it's just 1000" mentality, you feel is not too much, so it doesnt hurt you to spend a lot on it..

sheldonlcooper

Interesting. The price is good for me. I won't do an endeavor that takes more than 5 minutes so I can see a lot more re-rolling in my future. I don't think this will get us down from 500 however.

iamynaught

Hey, two new Dilithium sinks and they are permanent! That's great!

Oh, but you're taking away the free options? Well that's stupid. Really stupid. Like Stupid fell out of the stupid tree and hit every stupid branch on the way down before hitting the stupid ground, then got up and grabbed a stupid branch and bashed it's own stupid head in with the stupid stick! Come on, Cryptic! You guys have GOT to have better ideas than this floating around.

I get it, needing Dil sinks to help the economy is something the game has needed for a long time. I'd say years. However, this idea and everything it entails is just bad. If the option to simply buy more tokens than the RNG is giving out were the only change, this would, I believe, be getting near universal praise. It likely wouldn't be the cure-all you think it will be, but it'd be something. But removing the random ones from Admiralty and Endeavors is just not a good way to do it.

I can't tell you how many times I've ran out of one or both of the reroll/pass tokens as the system currently is. I've gone MONTHS without getting a single one, which meant that my progress in those two systems was significantly slowed. If I'd had the option to buy new ones I might have jumped on it, but definitely NOT at the expense of potentially getting free ones.

So, as it stands now, once what few reroll/pass tokens I have now run out, I will simply not be making progress in the Endeavor or Admiralty systems as fast as I can currently. I will NOT buy the tokens.

You are creating a progression problem and then SELLING the solution back to players. Not a good look, at all. At least with Admiralty I can throw shuttles and low tier ships at the missions I can't finish any other way. As far as the TRIBBLE Endeavors, I'll just skip doing them altogether. Like I normally do when I don't have tokens. Which means I'll be playing less.

Metrics.

jivedutch

Not a fan of this change, and all it will do is make thise system a bigger slog to play.

Instead of implementing the option to buy perk points for Dil (which would be a real sink, as that is what players would actually use) they implement a bigger grind-delay into the game, trying to get players to spend Dil for tokens, which only real whales would do ... which they wont, coz they already have all the Edv/Admiralty maxxed anyway.

All this will do is put bigger delays in account-wide leveling in place, because as already mentioned a few times above ... people will just not bother with them, and skip them entirely instead of spending 3.5 TFO's worth of Dil for a skip token, only to find out you just exchanged your "Play 3 iconian TFO" for a " Play 3 Lukari TFO" ..

If the reroll token will instead count as a " complete this objective for TRIBBLE Dil " ... then this would be a Dil sink, instead of a possibly very minor "long term" sink as it is implemented now.

live8evil

I kinda agree with the daily endeavor rerolls being available for dil, it's... something. With the other part i disagree completly - most people use the admirality system to grind for dil, so there is a very low chance anyone will buy those reroll tokens for dil. I'd find some other thing to charge dilithium, instead of that. Like for example ships, like the discontinued T5 lockbox ships or previous event ships. Just charge a ton of dilithium for the bajoran interceptor and watch as the zen price drops... Ah and those ships are a single character unlock anyway, so i imagine some people buying them over and over again. I would.

corinthalas

I'm not 100% on board with the complete removal of all other sources for the pass tokens. But I do think the game was too generous with them. Maybe leave the drop rate the same, but limit it to 1 of each per day.

starmanj

Admiralty Assignment Pass Tokens how is this good Idea just spend refined Dilithium to get more Unrefined dilithium faster?

corinthalas

starmanj wrote: »

Admiralty Assignment Pass Tokens how is this good Idea just spend refined Dilithium to get more Unrefined dilithium faster?

It would have been better to add a 'spend dilithium' option to speed up mission completions and ship repairs. And maybe a way to reset the daily xp cap. Because you're right, that particular change seems bizarre.

horridperson

"Paywalling" a QoL choice to fund dil sellers is a bandaid that doesn't feel good when you rip it off. At least people on the other side of the coin (dil sellers) seem to understand that it's better to introduce something for dil rather than taking things away. If I never had it there is no perception of losing it. It keeps people receptive and doesn't cause resentment when changes are additive.

EDIT: The "upside" variation on this would be paying dil to CHOOSE the appropriate level endeavor you want to replace the existing assignment with. Yeah, people would be gathering a lot of ground commodities and not playing content they were pushing with the system but you can only have so many design goals that work cohesively.

gaynomoly

Really... since there is no way to exchange dilithium for Zen as the exchange dried up. I guess this will work. That is sarcasm by by the way. THAT issue is causing this Lifetime player NOT to log in daily. You might want to address that first.

davefenestrator

Admiralty generates piles of credits and dil, so making people pay dil to optimize their speed of grinding it is a good choice.

Endeavors are 100% optional so making people pay dil because they insist on being able to level it every day seems fine to me too.

2,500 dil per roll or pass seems fine to me too. I probably won't buy either but I don't farm dil so I'm not really part of the dil-flation problem.

corinthalas

davefenestrator wrote: »

Admiralty generates piles of credits and dil, so making people pay dil to optimize their speed of grinding it is a good choice.

Endeavors are 100% optional so making people pay dil because they insist on being able to level it every day seems fine to me too.

2,500 dil per roll or pass seems fine to me too. I probably won't buy either but I don't farm dil so I'm not really part of the dil-flation problem.

No, as has already been pointed out, the change to admiralty pass tokens is stupid. You're spending a *greater* amount of *refined* dilithium to get a *lesser* amount of *ORE* back. Players aren't going to make that trade. Not only do you get nothing for your spent dilithium, you're *LOSING* dilithium for that nothing.

sierrafortune

This is like the exact right combo to not be an effective sink.

Not paying 2500 dil to skip an endeavor, lol I'll just wait till the next day if I get something I don't feel like doing. Can't imagine there are all that many people who care enough about endeavors to pay that much, and those that do will probably just do the content anyway. Like sure Lukari TFO's can be a hassle but they're perfectly pugable on normal if I don't have tokens.

Same with admiralty. Rewards from it aren't good enough to justify spending any amount of dil on a pass in the first place, especially when the reward is....unrefined dil.


Better option would be pay to pick an endeavor at like 1000 dil. Can't really think of anything that would be worth it for admiralty maybe pay to juice the campaign rewards up, like turn the Rommie upgrades into an ultimate upgrade or something.

But these systems are a low investment of player time and focus, which is why they work as well as they do. Creating a sink that bets on people putting in a greater deal of effort into completing them doesn't seem like an effective way to go.

fleetcaptain5#1134

Great, that simply means I'll keep using the tokens I still have. And once I'm out of tokens, I'll ignore any endeavour that I don't want to do.


I have plenty of dilithium, but I refuse to spend it on something that used to be free (and a chance based reward).

askatus

OK who had "make us pay for stuff we currently get for free" as their dil sink suggestion?

If it had been *let* people by tokens with dil, I'd have been behind that change. I rarely run low on those things personally, but I know a lot of people can never get enough. This, though? I'm worried that if it's even moderately successful they might start charging for something I do care about.

I'm sceptical about how much dil this is going to sink, but I guess Cryptic knows how many of these things get used in a day

davefenestrator

corinthalas wrote: »

davefenestrator wrote: »

Admiralty generates piles of credits and dil, so making people pay dil to optimize their speed of grinding it is a good choice.

Endeavors are 100% optional so making people pay dil because they insist on being able to level it every day seems fine to me too.

2,500 dil per roll or pass seems fine to me too. I probably won't buy either but I don't farm dil so I'm not really part of the dil-flation problem.

No, as has already been pointed out, the change to admiralty pass tokens is stupid. You're spending a *greater* amount of *refined* dilithium to get a *lesser* amount of *ORE* back. Players aren't going to make that trade. Not only do you get nothing for your spent dilithium, you're *LOSING* dilithium for that nothing.

If no one bites then they might lower the cost.

No one including the devs is expecting this to fix the dil market by itself, this is just something to try to help a bit while they work to add more and better sinks.

Finding 10 little sinks might be more realistic than looking for one silver bullet sink.

dragon#2626

Cryptic has been a fount of bad ideas over the last couple of years, but this one really takes the cake (and eats it, too).

jivedutch

While messing with the systems ... can we please put the single-use admiralty cards in boxxes or something, or get a scrap for dil option for this ... or at least get a filter option for it so disable them from view....
As a " everything in the cstore " player ... my ship list to find suitable cards is quite ridiculous ... one of the reasons i actually stopped playing admiralty ... (and use skip tokens on ... to get rid of the missions bloating my ship-roster) ..

fleetcaptain5#1134

This is nothing but punishing the players for Cryptic's greed. New, bigger and more expensive legendary packs, endless promo releases, Muddy stuff: everything has been made more expensive in an effort to squeeze ever more money out of players for less effort - until it destroyed the entire in-game economy.

And now you want players to pay for the fix - by taking away the only thing that made the system slightly more convenient?

This is a bad decision. Like I said, for me it does nothing except discourage me from fully participating in the Endeavour system from now on.

evilmark444

fred26291#2759 wrote: »

I know 2500 dil per pass token OVERPRICED!

That's not overpriced at all, if anything it's UNDER priced. 2500 dil is only 5 zen right now, 10 zen if we ever get back to a 250 exchange rate (unlikely). I personally will be spending a ton on this, I've always been stingy with my reroll tokens since until now they've been hard to get (I'd rather suffer through a ground based endeavor than find myself with no tokens to reroll a voth battlezone endeavor the next day). Once this goes live though I will be rerolling a TON, in fact I may never do another ground endeavor again.