Man you mistaken this post for the one i've created earlier today and there i've already explained that the rep dil is worthless. Let me take you trough it slowly, so you understand... There are rep items, that are worth making and upgrading and the massive majority of rep project stuff just isn't. And no, it's not about a different style of gameplay, it's just that some items are so ridiculously inferior to the "good" stuff, that it would be just idiotic to craft and upgrade them - it's just junk. Now that we have established, that most of reputation project items are garbage, lets move to the next point. I have a main character, i run the reputation to tier 6 and buy out the acc wide reputation discount - with the new REPUTATION VOUCHERS, isn't that awesome? No man, it's not awesome, because now every next character has a huge pile of useless purple rocks, that's worth only half a pile of useless purple rocks. And before you ask: i have multiple characters for a simple reason: i own around 150 ships and every alt has it's own ship, setup with epic gear, you name it. It's just easier that way, because if i wan't to change a setup on an alt - all my traits get messed up and most of the time i have to manualy move gear from ship to ship, which is all a huge waste of my time . Yeah, i'm done here.
I know we are going in circles.
By the sounds of it your done with Reputation on your "main" toon and all your alt toons... so how exactly does this effect you ?
Also the good or bad of reputation gear is not up to you to decide. Every rep has very usable items. There are at least 4 major weapons for cannon builds... at least as many for beam builds. Consoles.... multiple torpedo's that end up on every torpedo build. Ground devices... If people can't spend it all in one shot that is fine. Sit on the pool what's the big deal. Who knows in a year you might decide to try a torp boat instead, or a switch to cannons ect. When you do you have dill to cover the costs.
I don't subscribe to this silly idea... that reputation only has a couple usable items. That is just not reality.
There is no question there is useful stuff in Reputations for various builds. There is no ~350k dilithium worth of usefulness however. As I said before, I have newer characters that have unused reputation dil vouchers sitting around from recruitment events.
What do they need it for? Nothing!
If I recreated those particular characters and builds again I'd have 350k+ dilithium in vouchers sitting there doing nothing. Even my oldest characters from launch who have changed their builds several times I guarantee you have not gone through 350k worth of reputation gear. However that 350k dil in the past went to phoenix boxes, buying upgrade kits to get everything to mk 15.
That's something new players are not going to have now. Does it affect me? No, I still have millions of dilithium sitting around doing nothing that I can give to a new character if I wanted! New players won't have that.
Besides that, people have rightly brought up the fact that buying from the reputation store does not use voucher dilithium. Whereas in the past this didn't matter, now getting non-project equipment has become far more prohibitive without the T5 dilithium grant.
Fleet vouchers someone can expect to use up (I presume). Reputation vouchers are largely worthless after you have the few parts you need from the Rep system. And yes that varies from person to person and build to build. I highly doubt most people will ever see the value in 350k of reputation dilithium vouchers.
Punishing the masses for the few farmers out there is simply not fair, and this particular solution is very heavy handed when many other possibilities are available to make this more worthwhile to people than it is currently. At the very least they can add a phoenix box that outputs character bound items to the reputation store and let vouchers fund reputation store buys. Then new characters could use rep vouchers to buy upgrade kits or other phoenix goodies and other gear.
I would think we would be hearing more from the powers that be if this was serious. Do you think this could be part of the Pathyeager joke? Cryptic have been known to throw things like this our way over the years.
Man you mistaken this post for the one i've created earlier today and there i've already explained that the rep dil is worthless. Let me take you trough it slowly, so you understand... There are rep items, that are worth making and upgrading and the massive majority of rep project stuff just isn't. And no, it's not about a different style of gameplay, it's just that some items are so ridiculously inferior to the "good" stuff, that it would be just idiotic to craft and upgrade them - it's just junk. Now that we have established, that most of reputation project items are garbage, lets move to the next point. I have a main character, i run the reputation to tier 6 and buy out the acc wide reputation discount - with the new REPUTATION VOUCHERS, isn't that awesome? No man, it's not awesome, because now every next character has a huge pile of useless purple rocks, that's worth only half a pile of useless purple rocks. And before you ask: i have multiple characters for a simple reason: i own around 150 ships and every alt has it's own ship, setup with epic gear, you name it. It's just easier that way, because if i wan't to change a setup on an alt - all my traits get messed up and most of the time i have to manualy move gear from ship to ship, which is all a huge waste of my time . Yeah, i'm done here.
I know we are going in circles.
By the sounds of it your done with Reputation on your "main" toon and all your alt toons... so how exactly does this effect you ?
Also the good or bad of reputation gear is not up to you to decide. Every rep has very usable items. There are at least 4 major weapons for cannon builds... at least as many for beam builds. Consoles.... multiple torpedo's that end up on every torpedo build. Ground devices... If people can't spend it all in one shot that is fine. Sit on the pool what's the big deal. Who knows in a year you might decide to try a torp boat instead, or a switch to cannons ect. When you do you have dill to cover the costs.
I don't subscribe to this silly idea... that reputation only has a couple usable items. That is just not reality.
There is no question there is useful stuff in Reputations for various builds. There is no ~350k dilithium worth of usefulness however. As I said before, I have newer characters that have unused reputation dil vouchers sitting around from recruitment events.
What do they need it for? Nothing!
If I recreated those particular characters and builds again I'd have 350k+ dilithium in vouchers sitting there doing nothing. Even my oldest characters from launch who have changed their builds several times I guarantee you have not gone through 350k worth of reputation gear. However that 350k dil in the past went to phoenix boxes, buying upgrade kits to get everything to mk 15.
That's something new players are not going to have now. Does it affect me? No, I still have millions of dilithium sitting around doing nothing that I can give to a new character if I wanted! New players won't have that.
Besides that, people have rightly brought up the fact that buying from the reputation store does not use voucher dilithium. Whereas in the past this didn't matter, now getting non-project equipment has become far more prohibitive without the T5 dilithium grant.
Fleet vouchers someone can expect to use up (I presume). Reputation vouchers are largely worthless after you have the few parts you need from the Rep system. And yes that varies from person to person and build to build. I highly doubt most people will ever see the value in 350k of reputation dilithium vouchers.
Punishing the masses for the few farmers out there is simply not fair, and this particular solution is very heavy handed when many other possibilities are available to make this more worthwhile to people than it is currently. At the very least they can add a phoenix box that outputs character bound items to the reputation store and let vouchers fund reputation store buys. Then new characters could use rep vouchers to buy upgrade kits or other phoenix goodies and other gear.
I see your point... that 350k is a lot. I also agree the pool should be usable for the rep store stuff. I don't know why they wouldn't be allowing that. Hopefully they can make that change without breaking the game... cause it seems logical.
I know you and I talking about this when we have so much done already might seem self serving. Having said that... according to most people the game needs more sinks. Right. Well I the only sinks I can think of that stick around are gear upgrades... and new players are now going to need to sink more in... which is going to entice them to buy more dill rocks. People talking about more sinks more sinks... what do they think that is going to mean ? Its going to mean more new players spending MONEY.
Very few of the people calling for more sinks are really sitting on millions of purple rocks... they mostly sell them for zen as quick as they earn them. (I know cause everyone has done nothing but wine since the exchange passed instant gratification status months back) .
Yes new players are going to be asked to play harder or spend more.
That is what we are asking for when we ask for sinks anyway... so I'm not really seeing the issue.
Also as much as I am going on and on (I know) about people running big farms. The real issue is probably the massive amount of players with smaller setups they don't see as farms. Although they are still playing 10-20 toons that they aren't really playing. Its the tons of smaller size farms that are the real issue imo... cause its just been too easy to keep it running. I mean how many new players have many of us shown how to run pylons.... come on now we all do it. We are all helpful
PS perhaps to further constructive criticism in regard to Rep.... I have been saying for months what Cryptic needs to do is give us more rep gear worth having. IF I was Cryptic I would add new MORE expensive T6 rep gear. I would add a third (or forth in some cases) weapon type to each of the Reputation weapons and charge double for those specific ones... want a phaser rom beam ? Stuff like that... but ya charge double cause why not. Also they never added stat spun space gear. How about a Discovery set engine with comp engine stats ? WTH why not at this point... make the entire player base rebuy their engines and re gold. SINK baby sink. Also new players will be thankful for that massive pool won't they.
I would think we would be hearing more from the powers that be if this was serious. Do you think this could be part of the Pathyeager joke? Cryptic have been known to throw things like this our way over the years.
If only it were an April Fool's joke...
Let's see if this is still a thing come 01 May 2022 @ 0000 hrs CT.
The fact that the market is capped proves that point. The dilithium in game is not being used, people want to get rid of it, so much so that the price of dil can't go lower.
OR.... players believe they should be able to buy $200 ship bundles with other peoples money so they are selling rocks.
Orders right now take 10 days to go through... which means we can now figure out how much people are actually spending buying rocks. Depending on the day of the week its anywhere from 3-5 thousand dollars a day right now. Seems to me someone is actually buying them for something.
While I've already made my support for the change clear, I should say the last thing I want is feeling compelled to have to spend dil on some massive overkill sinks (but some more, and sensible ones are still needed, but carefully implemented), there is already plenty to spend dil on. The problem is having to spend such an insane amount of dil to get zen due to the overabundance of dil and it means I don't feel like I can easily spend my dil on other things as I greatly increase the time it takes to aquire zen, this is why I want less of it floating around from exploitative means like this because it rewards more casual play and doesn't demand I create industrial dil farming.
Yes, I know, this won't have an immediate effect, but they gotta start somewhere to stem the dil tsunami over time! Feeling like I have to farm large scale to get anwhere in this game, is not healthy to my interest, I'm a casual f2p'er, who only runs a couple characters and this change only benefits me. I want the dil I earn from ACTUALLY PLAYING the game to be worth more, simple, and spigots of absurd sources for it being tightened will benefit in the long run!
Let's hope you're right, but this still doesn't adress the practicaly useless reputation dil. And afaik the reasonable thing to spend it on - rep STORE is for some techincal reason out of question. Solution to that would be a dil -> rep dil exchange, while converting all the prices in the store from dil to rep dil.
Let's hope you're right, but this still doesn't adress the practicaly useless reputation dil. And afaik the reasonable thing to spend it on - rep STORE is for some techincal reason out of question. Solution to that would be a dil -> rep dil exchange, while converting all the prices in the store from dil to rep dil.
I'm not sure they need to add another exchange.
I for sure agree you should be able to spend that pool on the Reputation store items though. That is only logical.
I have also been a big fan of them adding more Reputation gear. Give us more gear to buy... and also more to upgrade which is a sink.
I don't believe adding new gear to the reputation system would be more development work then we should expect. As people like to point out people buy the same handful of items over and over.... start adding new things people want to buy. Give people a reason to run different shields different engines... maybe even a set so good people look at switching their entire build to Polaron or something. Sinks.
Let's hope you're right, but this still doesn't adress the practicaly useless reputation dil. And afaik the reasonable thing to spend it on - rep STORE is for some techincal reason out of question. Solution to that would be a dil -> rep dil exchange, while converting all the prices in the store from dil to rep dil.
reputation-only dil voucher is worth a LOT to me, because as I've mentioned in a post prior, it means I don't have to waste refined dil on trying many more reputation sets and devices, there's a lot I want from reps but I don't spend much doing so because I have too much pressure to put it all towards zen, this inflation squeezes me hard. I wish I could convert my unrefined dil from those past T5 rewards into vouchers because I have a positive rate of dil income anyway on my two characters so that backlog of dil to refine from t5 reward is almost worthless to me :P
OR.... players believe they should be able to buy $200 ship bundles with other peoples money so they are selling rocks.
Orders right now take 10 days to go through... which means we can now figure out how much people are actually spending buying rocks. Depending on the day of the week its anywhere from 3-5 thousand dollars a day right now. Seems to me someone is actually buying them for something.
You really have no clue what anyone is buying or what they are doing with it, so this is complete conjecture. For all anyone knows, people are selling Zen for dil to complete fleet projects. By all means though, please do go on with the wild speculation.
What do you mean.....
When the exchange ground out... one thing we where able to do was figure out exactly how much Zen was being sold for purple rocks. If I place a order to buy 1 Zen today... I can look at the exact time it sells vs when I listed it and figure out exactly how much Dillithium sold in the space of time. I had a sale go through yesterday... it was almost 10 days exactly to the hour it was like 10 days +2 hours or something... the exchange back log was at 3.8m when I posted. SO 3.8 Million zen was sold by players to other players in 10 days. Or 380,000 a day during that 10 day average. Or $3800 on average every day.
I'm not guessing... players between March 21st till the 31st spent $3800 a day on average buying purple rocks from other players.
What they are doing with it is 1000% IRRELEVENT. I don't care if they are buying it to finish fleet projects or buy gear or unlock traits or speed crafting. What does that matter... are some of those not legit sinks. People are spending money to buy the rocks is the point. People claiming the sinks are insufficient are half wrong. Sure we could use some more intelligent sinks perhaps... but the sinks we have are sinking 190,000,000 Dilithium every single day. I KNOW that cause the exchange ground out so the data is right there in the open.
3 - Everyone keeps saying we need sinks... not dill earning nerfs. Yet when they give you a sink you complain. Ok
4 - The fact that people are so upset about the rep dill change... highlights how many people where abusing it. If your a long time player you hit T5 YEARS ago... so why so upset ? The only answer is cause people have been deleting toons and starting new ones to abuse the system.
I'm not Shill... BUT I'll give credit when its due. This was the change that needed to happen >.< I am actually shocked they had the stones to follow through with it. Good on them.
3-When you create a sink by charging for something that was a free reward before that(and removing the free reward), it creates upset. Just sayig "People wanted a sink" does not make it ok. Now, I've heard they added the re-rolls back to the rewards, which takes away my only problem. I don't mind having the option to buy them if I run out of free ones.
4- Have you ever heard of new toons? It doesn't matter how many years I've played, my new toons require me to grind up to t5 in the reps. Also, assuming that everyone who dislikes this is a farmer upset at losing dil to convert is, well offensive. I've played since 2013. Casually. While I occasionally sell dil, its usually in very small amounts. I don't think I've bought more than 3000 zen with dil in almost a decade. I have sold about 15-25k zen in that time.
That said, I hate this decision. As I've said by the time you reach t5 you have already basically gotten everything you want from the reps(except space shields), so the vouchers don't do all that much outside of whatever rep has the shields you want. Before, I could upgrade and, if neccesary, re-engineer the gear using the dil provided(or replace dil spent to do this with the dil provided)... Now I just have useless vouchers building up when I finish.... Well it did let me decide not to bother with any rep i don't get gear from so....
3 - Everyone keeps saying we need sinks... not dill earning nerfs. Yet when they give you a sink you complain. Ok
4 - The fact that people are so upset about the rep dill change... highlights how many people where abusing it. If your a long time player you hit T5 YEARS ago... so why so upset ? The only answer is cause people have been deleting toons and starting new ones to abuse the system.
I'm not Shill... BUT I'll give credit when its due. This was the change that needed to happen >.< I am actually shocked they had the stones to follow through with it. Good on them.
3-When you create a sink by charging for something that was a free reward before that(and removing the free reward), it creates upset. Just sayig "People wanted a sink" does not make it ok. Now, I've heard they added the re-rolls back to the rewards, which takes away my only problem. I don't mind having the option to buy them if I run out of free ones.
4- Have you ever heard of new toons? It doesn't matter how many years I've played, my new toons require me to grind up to t5 in the reps. Also, assuming that everyone who dislikes this is a farmer upset at losing dil to convert is, well offensive. I've played since 2013. Casually. While I occasionally sell dil, its usually in very small amounts. I don't think I've bought more than 3000 zen with dil in almost a decade. I have sold about 15-25k zen in that time.
That said, I hate this decision. As I've said by the time you reach t5 you have already basically gotten everything you want from the reps(except space shields), so the vouchers don't do all that much outside of whatever rep has the shields you want. Before, I could upgrade and, if neccesary, re-engineer the gear using the dil provided(or replace dil spent to do this with the dil provided)... Now I just have useless vouchers building up when I finish.... Well it did let me decide not to bother with any rep i don't get gear from so....
3... I don't mean to beat a dead horse at all... But Cryptic has said they probably aren't coming up with any new 1,000s of hours of dev time systems to sink dill. That only leaves existing sinks. I get your point though yes having things removed is annoying.
4.... yes I have heard of new toons I have just under 40 toons myself. To be clear no matter how blunt I have been a few times... no of course not everyone is a "farmer" in the evil way we all think of them. The T5 rewards though where a part of a lot of peoples math on earning Dill. Even people that had relatively small stables of 10-20 toons who didn't consider their stripping a handful of new toons as "farming". It adds up across an entire games population.
You do bring up a good point on the way people level reps and acquire gear as they level. Hey its not a perfect solution, and it seems like they should have thought out some of the uses like the Reputation store items.
There is still plenty of reason to upgrade reputations all of them. Last I checked people where still unlocking ground and space traits at 1-4. Once you get to 4 well 5 is right there. Tier 6 gives you a damage buff to all your rep weapons... and access the respec token, a free ship module. I mean the reputation system has a ton of benefits and rewards beyond just a 32k dill payout. At least if its a toon you actually plan to play I guess.
Many many years ago when these Reputation Systems started to multiply. A lot of the community asked for these to become account-wide. Well, Cryptic... You should have listened to us back then. Instead, you earned this mess your teams created! Enjoy!
Frankly, I think they should add more timer buyouts in places where there aren't any, or are in zen instead.
Something like the R&D or upgrade system. You can set off a project, and wait for it to finish, or you can pay dil to finish it early.
That's a sink that both doesn't hurt existing players, and offers a shortcut for those that are impatient or have dil to spend.
It might not work, but at least it doesn't break the game or affect players negatively in the process, like literally every other action Cryptic has taken, save for the vanity shields.
They already do for R&D projects. Lost a few dilithium that way due to an errant button press. And some R&D stuff takes dilithium too, whether flooding the exchange with omnidirectional phasers or teaching your tactical officer how to make your dreadnought invisible.
Meanwhile, just took an inventory. 650k dilithium (on XBox) and 20k in reputation vouchers on one of my toons. I'll miss the big payout if I ever make another for a recruiting event, playing for a few years now judging by how many Risian ships are in drydock. And this was after a decent cashout to zen (prices went down to 280!).
This is probably the easiest of the 'fixes' that they're looking at, which is why it's being put in now. Let's see if there's anything worthwhile later. (I know my Klingon carrier fan would loooove to see better pets ... )
Right.. the way the R&D system works is the example I was using when suggesting to deploy that mechanism to other areas of the game, such as early completion of rep projects, or lowering daily event CDs.
Anyway, to follow-up with what I and others have said in here, I like the idea of a universal dilithium voucher (well, not really, but it's better than what we have now).
This voucher could be used anywhere in the game regular dilithium is accepted, except for the exchange.
Rep store, fleet projects and stores, dilithium store, whatever.
Anywhere else except the dilithium exchange.
This gives the players that earn it the freedom to use it anywhere they want in the game: buying rep gear, fleet gear, or phoenix upgrades, while isolating it from the zen market.
The real complicated part of this implementation though (aside from the mess that is the store system) is being able to provide the user a choice of which to use in each area. Currently there is no choice, and if vouchers are available and eligible for use, they are used first.
I could get behind a universal voucher, HOWEVER that would free up earnable dil for the exchange.
Farmer Giles could soon pile that up.
While I poo poo the current change (strangely coincidental with the ownership change I might add), it has less hassle than a universal voucher does and Cryptic loves less hassle.
In spirit I'm for it but in practice it would be troublesome to implement in a fair way.
well i just finished getting tier 5 rep done on my new klingon recruit and i'm sitting on 352k rep dilithium and have 2 more reps finishing tomorrow. so i'll be at 410k rep dilitium and only have 5 or 6 or pieces to get before my build is finished so i will have 350k rep dil left over with nothing to spend it on i can't even use it to level my fleet or anything. so just what shall i do with this cryptic. you keep trying to address issues and fix them with the wrong solutions. when you brought out mudds market and started to put these rediculous bundles in there for outrageous prices you created this giant demand for zen in the game. If you want to fix the dil exchanges issues how about making more thing that are available and useful in the game which would make people want to spend dilithium. and speaking of dilithium do something about the colony world dilithium cost since you took away our dil. 99k/mission to run a daily upgrade that you have to run 150 times for each category plus the upgrade going from tier 4 to tier 5 is extreme. how about making a way that people can convert this dil to fleet dil for a fee or small percentage to convert it to something useful
if you want to do something with the dil how about making it possible to reclaim lockbox ships and gear on your other characters once you have aquired the item. people would be willing to pay 200-300k dil to reclaim one of these ships on a 2nd character or may it an account unlock for a million dil or for that matter bring out some useful ships that can be purchased with dilithium in the tier 6 range. making it so people can buy tier 1-4 ships that no one uses for more than 10 hours before the level past that rank was kind of useless.
When the exchange ground out... one thing we where able to do was figure out exactly how much Zen was being sold for purple rocks. If I place a order to buy 1 Zen today... I can look at the exact time it sells vs when I listed it and figure out exactly how much Dillithium sold in the space of time. I had a sale go through yesterday... it was almost 10 days exactly to the hour it was like 10 days +2 hours or something... the exchange back log was at 3.8m when I posted. SO 3.8 Million zen was sold by players to other players in 10 days. Or 380,000 a day during that 10 day average. Or $3800 on average every day.
I'm not guessing... players between March 21st till the 31st spent $3800 a day on average buying purple rocks from other players.
What they are doing with it is 1000% IRRELEVENT. I don't care if they are buying it to finish fleet projects or buy gear or unlock traits or speed crafting. What does that matter... are some of those not legit sinks. People are spending money to buy the rocks is the point. People claiming the sinks are insufficient are half wrong. Sure we could use some more intelligent sinks perhaps... but the sinks we have are sinking 190,000,000 Dilithium every single day. I KNOW that cause the exchange ground out so the data is right there in the open.
First it was everyone is an evil farmer abusing the T5 reputation rewards. Next it was people using dilithium to buy the expensive ship packs. Now it is people using it for fleet projects. Pick one and stick with it.
I think we might be talking about two different things.
People grinding dilithium can do what ever they want with it. I have no idea how much was being earned by farmers... Cryptic knows. They know who was rolling and deleting and what they where doing with the dill. They know what everyone is doing with the stuff... and they know how much people are buying from other players. (that bit we know now that the exchange is stuck at 500)
I suspect most players that where really using the T5 payouts on mass where converting it to dill and not really using a ton of it themselves. Of course some of it... but clearly a lot of people are selling dill. That isn't in dispute is it.
I think I misunderstood what you where saying.... I think you where saying people are farming to fill fleet projects and not buy Zen from other players. I think I heard you saying people where buying Dill from people selling to fill fleet projects... anyway it doesn't matter.
Sure some people where farming Dill to fill projects... most people farm to sell the Dill to other players for Zen. We all know that to be true.
The point about the numbers... is as I was saying. For everyone talking about the "real solution" being more sinks. I'm sorry I disagree. We have sinks lots of them... one being fleet projects sure. But 190 MILLION dill is sold by players daily.... now that is a lot of dill, so the game NEEDS to have people farming. I am not suggesting farming is even a bad thing. (its the ease of the T5 rep stuff that was an issue but the game needs SOME farming to feed the people looking to buy it) Anyway my point is the sinks we already have work and work well.... the game sinks a ton of Dill every day. I only KNOW about the dill being sunk that is being purchased by people buying it with Zen. How much players are grinding to use themselves... only Cryptic knows that.
A sink is not just a random item with a dilithium price-tag, it also have to be ATTRACTIVE for players, so they're willing and HAPPY to spend huge amounts of dil on.
As I posted in another thread: I was unlucky to have finished T5 reps just shortly after the patch, and after having bought every rep items for my build I'm now sitting on 328k of utterly TRIBBLE worthless reputation voucher.
Mind-blowing "fix" that somehow managed to completely "forget" about:
The existence of rep sponsorship + rep discounts
The sheer volume of dil a T5 reputation actually rewards
How little dil you actually need to complete a certain build by purchasing a few rep items
The point about the numbers... is as I was saying. For everyone talking about the "real solution" being more sinks. I'm sorry I disagree. We have sinks lots of them... one being fleet projects sure.
Fleets that have reached maturity do not need huge sums of dilithium to progress any further. There are very few other sinks that offer anything worthwhile in my opinion or are such a pittance in terms of cost they are easily outmatched by the ease of dilithium gain through normal gameplay.
While I don't disagree they need to rethink and change or add some sinks.
Again we also have to accept the facts at some point. People are buying 3-5 thousand dollars worth of dill every day for something. This is why I don't buy the all the sinks suck... all the fleets are done, arguments.
As much as most players like you and myself have a hard time seeing what people are spending it on.... its being spent. Perhaps its just that we been here to long and we are done upgrading gear, upgrading fleets. Clearly someone is finding a use for all those rocks.
It will be interesting to see what they change from here out. I think this change that has people upset was required. What they change next to "sink" more dill, its going to be interesting. I can't think of what they can actually do that would be meaningful that doesn't involve actual development, which doesn't seem to be what they have been doing. There looking for quick fixes so we'll see what comes next I guess.
As I posted in another thread: I was unlucky to have finished T5 reps just shortly after the patch, and after having bought every rep items for my build I'm now sitting on 328k of utterly TRIBBLE worthless reputation voucher.
Mind-blowing "fix" that somehow managed to completely "forget" about:
The existence of rep sponsorship + rep discounts
The sheer volume of dil a T5 reputation actually rewards
How little dil you actually need to complete a certain build by purchasing a few rep items
I don't believe it is required to spend it all at once.
Its already refined... which should be a nice bonus, and if you have left overs good. Hold on to it... the hot build of the month changes now and then. Or perhaps you'll decide to try a torp boat down the road. Or who knows perhaps cryptic will actually add new rep gear again at some point. Having dill stashed for a rainy day might come in handy 6 months or a year from now.
If it really bothers you that you have left overs... put your bridge officers in Rep ground sets. lol
Well we all know the market tanked, stopped working when they brought those silly vanity shields up for sale for a few days or one day (as if it matters) that is when the dil->zen no longer had numbers. Days before the vanity shields it was around 300 -> 1 dil to zen. We all thought it was a mistake in the programming, maybe it still is, who knows. The problems with devs having player accounts that are f2p and work accounts, is that they will spend most of their time on the work accounts where they can activate things like god mode or access to all ships, items, kits, mods, weapons, armor and so on.
So sure they can play with us lowest on the depth chart f2p, but they know they can go back to their work accounts to have access to what they want. We have no idea if they can exchange things between these accounts being that they are the devs or if they get the dil easy on the f2p to test features.
The problem is that those of us who are still bringing up recruits from the Klingon, Delta and whatever else. I know I haven't had the time to work on their reputation. I have the main toons to work on daily progress events that are just grind and old tfo or even longer new tfo 5-20 times depending on the eventually length. We all know we have more than 1 account (meaning sign-ins) so it can take a while. However getting the dil from all the tier 5 reputations is how that new character can buy into things to get partially even with the main toons on the same account. They won't be able to get all the things the long time toons have. Now they won't be able to get <blank> because all they can use that dil for is strictly rep gear and for some silly reason the stores for the reputations was "not included at this time might be for the future" (paraphrase) well you better make that future happen soon or when you get it coded all you will here is just the background sounds and empty ques as majority of players have finally become sick of changes that are meant to be good for all of us when they are meant to the benefit of Cryptic.
You shut down to enhance the reward/bonus feature where you for example signed in 3 times to Star Trek Online and you gave points that once a person hit a point level they could get zen. You made an update and then nothing. Why, because you weren't getting people to play and spend money on all your games. One MMO, maybe 2 is usually the max most can handle these days. So this was quietly killed off, with a promise of returning all new and interesting, must of been the same code the foundry was based on when it was killed off.
You made that silly change to Win10 during an event. Since the change I have had more disconnects with your servers than win 7 (no I AM NOT ASKING FOR WIN 7 BACK I JUST felt doing it during an event was a horrible idea, wait till that event, what the Omega/anniversary. Nope lets change things right in the last week of the event. I am sorry to say I have not seen anything that has made me say, wow what a difference. I have a 3070ti from EVGA and I haven't noticed anything great. Instead you have too many special effects that it can be impossible to find an enemy ship. You have enemy ships appear as ghost, at least the jupiter with platforms (or the last of the 3 items) they will appear as hole, with a target over their head and then vanish. Borg ships that leave no pieces around like it use to, instead they fizzle away like they were just made of acid and then the last thing you see is like 1 layer of the ship brown and then it is all gone.
Now upon all of these and many more issues you decided lets mess with the main way people get dil. Whatever you did on Neverwinter Online that made its dil (astral diamonds) unable to change over to zen/cryptic must have been the same here as I know many players said don't worry about being able to get anything with your astral diamonds (Dil) even though the game use to say you can use in game currency to buy things in the zen store with the exchange. What you needed to do was instead of tying the dil to one way to spend, simply counter by raising the prices on items that require dil, so that reputation pers. shield, instead of 9,000, it would become 13,000 (yes I would hate that as well but you would not ruin it for those who might have created new toons on an active account, and you have now managed to make any new player either turn over cash to you or find themselves unable to get anything.). The fighter squadrons elite are over 30K, which is about the rewards for a tier 5 completion.
So you really have tossed the server around like a very heavy hot potato (no this is no sick reference to anything) that just gets tossed on the ground and the other person has to pick it up within so many seconds or they get stuck having to use their f2p toon that week. This was or is pushing things to the last straw in what was a huge haystack. Now there are just straws here and there and now you want to pick those up to. Oh well lets see how long before gearbox takes over the management and makes things unbearable. I mean no offense to gearbox but they aren't a well known quantity in the MMO world and so we have no idea if they will make things worse.
As most agree the suddenness of the change with no warning but what, 1 day maybe 1 1/2 days. So nice surprise kick to the gut on this one.
Good points everyone. But it all comes down to one thing -- you can either buy zen with real money or trade dilithium for it. Since Cryptic wants more purchases of zen with money, they will continue to reduce the means to earn dilithium. It is unfortunate that they chose to reduce dilithium by removing rewards instead of enticing players to buy new gear with it. The phoenix box is over due for new ships and gear and there are other things that players would willingly spend dilithium on (as mentioned by other posters), if offered. Instead, it is less effort/more profitable to remove something. One thing they should consider is the carrot and the stick. How much will players put up with before they go play something else?
Comments
There is no question there is useful stuff in Reputations for various builds. There is no ~350k dilithium worth of usefulness however. As I said before, I have newer characters that have unused reputation dil vouchers sitting around from recruitment events.
What do they need it for? Nothing!
If I recreated those particular characters and builds again I'd have 350k+ dilithium in vouchers sitting there doing nothing. Even my oldest characters from launch who have changed their builds several times I guarantee you have not gone through 350k worth of reputation gear. However that 350k dil in the past went to phoenix boxes, buying upgrade kits to get everything to mk 15.
That's something new players are not going to have now. Does it affect me? No, I still have millions of dilithium sitting around doing nothing that I can give to a new character if I wanted! New players won't have that.
Besides that, people have rightly brought up the fact that buying from the reputation store does not use voucher dilithium. Whereas in the past this didn't matter, now getting non-project equipment has become far more prohibitive without the T5 dilithium grant.
Fleet vouchers someone can expect to use up (I presume). Reputation vouchers are largely worthless after you have the few parts you need from the Rep system. And yes that varies from person to person and build to build. I highly doubt most people will ever see the value in 350k of reputation dilithium vouchers.
Punishing the masses for the few farmers out there is simply not fair, and this particular solution is very heavy handed when many other possibilities are available to make this more worthwhile to people than it is currently. At the very least they can add a phoenix box that outputs character bound items to the reputation store and let vouchers fund reputation store buys. Then new characters could use rep vouchers to buy upgrade kits or other phoenix goodies and other gear.
Has anyone noticed the date?
I would think we would be hearing more from the powers that be if this was serious. Do you think this could be part of the Pathyeager joke? Cryptic have been known to throw things like this our way over the years.
I see your point... that 350k is a lot. I also agree the pool should be usable for the rep store stuff. I don't know why they wouldn't be allowing that. Hopefully they can make that change without breaking the game... cause it seems logical.
I know you and I talking about this when we have so much done already might seem self serving. Having said that... according to most people the game needs more sinks. Right. Well I the only sinks I can think of that stick around are gear upgrades... and new players are now going to need to sink more in... which is going to entice them to buy more dill rocks. People talking about more sinks more sinks... what do they think that is going to mean ? Its going to mean more new players spending MONEY.
Very few of the people calling for more sinks are really sitting on millions of purple rocks... they mostly sell them for zen as quick as they earn them. (I know cause everyone has done nothing but wine since the exchange passed instant gratification status months back) .
Yes new players are going to be asked to play harder or spend more.
That is what we are asking for when we ask for sinks anyway... so I'm not really seeing the issue.
Also as much as I am going on and on (I know) about people running big farms. The real issue is probably the massive amount of players with smaller setups they don't see as farms. Although they are still playing 10-20 toons that they aren't really playing. Its the tons of smaller size farms that are the real issue imo... cause its just been too easy to keep it running. I mean how many new players have many of us shown how to run pylons.... come on now we all do it. We are all helpful
PS perhaps to further constructive criticism in regard to Rep.... I have been saying for months what Cryptic needs to do is give us more rep gear worth having. IF I was Cryptic I would add new MORE expensive T6 rep gear. I would add a third (or forth in some cases) weapon type to each of the Reputation weapons and charge double for those specific ones... want a phaser rom beam ? Stuff like that... but ya charge double cause why not. Also they never added stat spun space gear. How about a Discovery set engine with comp engine stats ? WTH why not at this point... make the entire player base rebuy their engines and re gold. SINK baby sink. Also new players will be thankful for that massive pool won't they.
If only it were an April Fool's joke...
Let's see if this is still a thing come 01 May 2022 @ 0000 hrs CT.
OR.... players believe they should be able to buy $200 ship bundles with other peoples money so they are selling rocks.
Orders right now take 10 days to go through... which means we can now figure out how much people are actually spending buying rocks. Depending on the day of the week its anywhere from 3-5 thousand dollars a day right now. Seems to me someone is actually buying them for something.
Yes, I know, this won't have an immediate effect, but they gotta start somewhere to stem the dil tsunami over time! Feeling like I have to farm large scale to get anwhere in this game, is not healthy to my interest, I'm a casual f2p'er, who only runs a couple characters and this change only benefits me. I want the dil I earn from ACTUALLY PLAYING the game to be worth more, simple, and spigots of absurd sources for it being tightened will benefit in the long run!
I'm not sure they need to add another exchange.
I for sure agree you should be able to spend that pool on the Reputation store items though. That is only logical.
I have also been a big fan of them adding more Reputation gear. Give us more gear to buy... and also more to upgrade which is a sink.
I don't believe adding new gear to the reputation system would be more development work then we should expect. As people like to point out people buy the same handful of items over and over.... start adding new things people want to buy. Give people a reason to run different shields different engines... maybe even a set so good people look at switching their entire build to Polaron or something. Sinks.
reputation-only dil voucher is worth a LOT to me, because as I've mentioned in a post prior, it means I don't have to waste refined dil on trying many more reputation sets and devices, there's a lot I want from reps but I don't spend much doing so because I have too much pressure to put it all towards zen, this inflation squeezes me hard. I wish I could convert my unrefined dil from those past T5 rewards into vouchers because I have a positive rate of dil income anyway on my two characters so that backlog of dil to refine from t5 reward is almost worthless to me :P
What do you mean.....
When the exchange ground out... one thing we where able to do was figure out exactly how much Zen was being sold for purple rocks. If I place a order to buy 1 Zen today... I can look at the exact time it sells vs when I listed it and figure out exactly how much Dillithium sold in the space of time. I had a sale go through yesterday... it was almost 10 days exactly to the hour it was like 10 days +2 hours or something... the exchange back log was at 3.8m when I posted. SO 3.8 Million zen was sold by players to other players in 10 days. Or 380,000 a day during that 10 day average. Or $3800 on average every day.
I'm not guessing... players between March 21st till the 31st spent $3800 a day on average buying purple rocks from other players.
What they are doing with it is 1000% IRRELEVENT. I don't care if they are buying it to finish fleet projects or buy gear or unlock traits or speed crafting. What does that matter... are some of those not legit sinks. People are spending money to buy the rocks is the point. People claiming the sinks are insufficient are half wrong. Sure we could use some more intelligent sinks perhaps... but the sinks we have are sinking 190,000,000 Dilithium every single day. I KNOW that cause the exchange ground out so the data is right there in the open.
3-When you create a sink by charging for something that was a free reward before that(and removing the free reward), it creates upset. Just sayig "People wanted a sink" does not make it ok. Now, I've heard they added the re-rolls back to the rewards, which takes away my only problem. I don't mind having the option to buy them if I run out of free ones.
4- Have you ever heard of new toons? It doesn't matter how many years I've played, my new toons require me to grind up to t5 in the reps. Also, assuming that everyone who dislikes this is a farmer upset at losing dil to convert is, well offensive. I've played since 2013. Casually. While I occasionally sell dil, its usually in very small amounts. I don't think I've bought more than 3000 zen with dil in almost a decade. I have sold about 15-25k zen in that time.
That said, I hate this decision. As I've said by the time you reach t5 you have already basically gotten everything you want from the reps(except space shields), so the vouchers don't do all that much outside of whatever rep has the shields you want. Before, I could upgrade and, if neccesary, re-engineer the gear using the dil provided(or replace dil spent to do this with the dil provided)... Now I just have useless vouchers building up when I finish.... Well it did let me decide not to bother with any rep i don't get gear from so....
3... I don't mean to beat a dead horse at all... But Cryptic has said they probably aren't coming up with any new 1,000s of hours of dev time systems to sink dill. That only leaves existing sinks. I get your point though yes having things removed is annoying.
4.... yes I have heard of new toons I have just under 40 toons myself. To be clear no matter how blunt I have been a few times... no of course not everyone is a "farmer" in the evil way we all think of them. The T5 rewards though where a part of a lot of peoples math on earning Dill. Even people that had relatively small stables of 10-20 toons who didn't consider their stripping a handful of new toons as "farming". It adds up across an entire games population.
You do bring up a good point on the way people level reps and acquire gear as they level. Hey its not a perfect solution, and it seems like they should have thought out some of the uses like the Reputation store items.
There is still plenty of reason to upgrade reputations all of them. Last I checked people where still unlocking ground and space traits at 1-4. Once you get to 4 well 5 is right there. Tier 6 gives you a damage buff to all your rep weapons... and access the respec token, a free ship module. I mean the reputation system has a ton of benefits and rewards beyond just a 32k dill payout. At least if its a toon you actually plan to play I guess.
Right.. the way the R&D system works is the example I was using when suggesting to deploy that mechanism to other areas of the game, such as early completion of rep projects, or lowering daily event CDs.
Anyway, to follow-up with what I and others have said in here, I like the idea of a universal dilithium voucher (well, not really, but it's better than what we have now).
This voucher could be used anywhere in the game regular dilithium is accepted, except for the exchange.
Rep store, fleet projects and stores, dilithium store, whatever.
Anywhere else except the dilithium exchange.
This gives the players that earn it the freedom to use it anywhere they want in the game: buying rep gear, fleet gear, or phoenix upgrades, while isolating it from the zen market.
The real complicated part of this implementation though (aside from the mess that is the store system) is being able to provide the user a choice of which to use in each area. Currently there is no choice, and if vouchers are available and eligible for use, they are used first.
Farmer Giles could soon pile that up.
While I poo poo the current change (strangely coincidental with the ownership change I might add), it has less hassle than a universal voucher does and Cryptic loves less hassle.
In spirit I'm for it but in practice it would be troublesome to implement in a fair way.
if you want to do something with the dil how about making it possible to reclaim lockbox ships and gear on your other characters once you have aquired the item. people would be willing to pay 200-300k dil to reclaim one of these ships on a 2nd character or may it an account unlock for a million dil or for that matter bring out some useful ships that can be purchased with dilithium in the tier 6 range. making it so people can buy tier 1-4 ships that no one uses for more than 10 hours before the level past that rank was kind of useless.
I think we might be talking about two different things.
People grinding dilithium can do what ever they want with it. I have no idea how much was being earned by farmers... Cryptic knows. They know who was rolling and deleting and what they where doing with the dill. They know what everyone is doing with the stuff... and they know how much people are buying from other players. (that bit we know now that the exchange is stuck at 500)
I suspect most players that where really using the T5 payouts on mass where converting it to dill and not really using a ton of it themselves. Of course some of it... but clearly a lot of people are selling dill. That isn't in dispute is it.
I think I misunderstood what you where saying.... I think you where saying people are farming to fill fleet projects and not buy Zen from other players. I think I heard you saying people where buying Dill from people selling to fill fleet projects... anyway it doesn't matter.
Sure some people where farming Dill to fill projects... most people farm to sell the Dill to other players for Zen. We all know that to be true.
The point about the numbers... is as I was saying. For everyone talking about the "real solution" being more sinks. I'm sorry I disagree. We have sinks lots of them... one being fleet projects sure. But 190 MILLION dill is sold by players daily.... now that is a lot of dill, so the game NEEDS to have people farming. I am not suggesting farming is even a bad thing. (its the ease of the T5 rep stuff that was an issue but the game needs SOME farming to feed the people looking to buy it) Anyway my point is the sinks we already have work and work well.... the game sinks a ton of Dill every day. I only KNOW about the dill being sunk that is being purchased by people buying it with Zen. How much players are grinding to use themselves... only Cryptic knows that.
Mind-blowing "fix" that somehow managed to completely "forget" about:
While I don't disagree they need to rethink and change or add some sinks.
Again we also have to accept the facts at some point. People are buying 3-5 thousand dollars worth of dill every day for something. This is why I don't buy the all the sinks suck... all the fleets are done, arguments.
As much as most players like you and myself have a hard time seeing what people are spending it on.... its being spent. Perhaps its just that we been here to long and we are done upgrading gear, upgrading fleets. Clearly someone is finding a use for all those rocks.
It will be interesting to see what they change from here out. I think this change that has people upset was required. What they change next to "sink" more dill, its going to be interesting. I can't think of what they can actually do that would be meaningful that doesn't involve actual development, which doesn't seem to be what they have been doing. There looking for quick fixes so we'll see what comes next I guess.
I don't believe it is required to spend it all at once.
Its already refined... which should be a nice bonus, and if you have left overs good. Hold on to it... the hot build of the month changes now and then. Or perhaps you'll decide to try a torp boat down the road. Or who knows perhaps cryptic will actually add new rep gear again at some point. Having dill stashed for a rainy day might come in handy 6 months or a year from now.
If it really bothers you that you have left overs... put your bridge officers in Rep ground sets. lol
So sure they can play with us lowest on the depth chart f2p, but they know they can go back to their work accounts to have access to what they want. We have no idea if they can exchange things between these accounts being that they are the devs or if they get the dil easy on the f2p to test features.
The problem is that those of us who are still bringing up recruits from the Klingon, Delta and whatever else. I know I haven't had the time to work on their reputation. I have the main toons to work on daily progress events that are just grind and old tfo or even longer new tfo 5-20 times depending on the eventually length. We all know we have more than 1 account (meaning sign-ins) so it can take a while. However getting the dil from all the tier 5 reputations is how that new character can buy into things to get partially even with the main toons on the same account. They won't be able to get all the things the long time toons have. Now they won't be able to get <blank> because all they can use that dil for is strictly rep gear and for some silly reason the stores for the reputations was "not included at this time might be for the future" (paraphrase) well you better make that future happen soon or when you get it coded all you will here is just the background sounds and empty ques as majority of players have finally become sick of changes that are meant to be good for all of us when they are meant to the benefit of Cryptic.
You shut down to enhance the reward/bonus feature where you for example signed in 3 times to Star Trek Online and you gave points that once a person hit a point level they could get zen. You made an update and then nothing. Why, because you weren't getting people to play and spend money on all your games. One MMO, maybe 2 is usually the max most can handle these days. So this was quietly killed off, with a promise of returning all new and interesting, must of been the same code the foundry was based on when it was killed off.
You made that silly change to Win10 during an event. Since the change I have had more disconnects with your servers than win 7 (no I AM NOT ASKING FOR WIN 7 BACK I JUST felt doing it during an event was a horrible idea, wait till that event, what the Omega/anniversary. Nope lets change things right in the last week of the event. I am sorry to say I have not seen anything that has made me say, wow what a difference. I have a 3070ti from EVGA and I haven't noticed anything great. Instead you have too many special effects that it can be impossible to find an enemy ship. You have enemy ships appear as ghost, at least the jupiter with platforms (or the last of the 3 items) they will appear as hole, with a target over their head and then vanish. Borg ships that leave no pieces around like it use to, instead they fizzle away like they were just made of acid and then the last thing you see is like 1 layer of the ship brown and then it is all gone.
Now upon all of these and many more issues you decided lets mess with the main way people get dil. Whatever you did on Neverwinter Online that made its dil (astral diamonds) unable to change over to zen/cryptic must have been the same here as I know many players said don't worry about being able to get anything with your astral diamonds (Dil) even though the game use to say you can use in game currency to buy things in the zen store with the exchange. What you needed to do was instead of tying the dil to one way to spend, simply counter by raising the prices on items that require dil, so that reputation pers. shield, instead of 9,000, it would become 13,000 (yes I would hate that as well but you would not ruin it for those who might have created new toons on an active account, and you have now managed to make any new player either turn over cash to you or find themselves unable to get anything.). The fighter squadrons elite are over 30K, which is about the rewards for a tier 5 completion.
So you really have tossed the server around like a very heavy hot potato (no this is no sick reference to anything) that just gets tossed on the ground and the other person has to pick it up within so many seconds or they get stuck having to use their f2p toon that week. This was or is pushing things to the last straw in what was a huge haystack. Now there are just straws here and there and now you want to pick those up to. Oh well lets see how long before gearbox takes over the management and makes things unbearable. I mean no offense to gearbox but they aren't a well known quantity in the MMO world and so we have no idea if they will make things worse.
As most agree the suddenness of the change with no warning but what, 1 day maybe 1 1/2 days. So nice surprise kick to the gut on this one.