Okay, the tone here, quite frankly, is beginning to remind me of an office job I once had, but lost because I "didn't look busy enough". Sure, I was doing my job, but I wasn't bustling around and hustling, so they let me go.
Six months later, that company nearly went under, and after they reorganized, the people who thought I wasn't "busy enough" were gone. Not saying there's a direct correlation there, but the data are suggestive.
A lot of the complaints here, though, do indeed boil down to "when the pink bubble is on, the jellyfish just sits there." Well, in a real-world navy, after launching its aircraft a carrier just sits there too - its weapons are entirely defensive. Does that make an aircraft carrier "AFK"?
Using the console and ship wouldn't suddenly become impossible if the bubble were limited to a maximum uptime of, for example, 30 seconds. You'd still be able to use it tactically, it could still be an useful addition to the ship, without enabling people to fully rely on it and spend an entire mission not doing anything else besides activating it once.
The exploitability should be fixed though, and so far I have yet to see a convincing argument why hitting a button once and then do nothing for 15 more minutes shouldn't be considered exploiting.
Yes, that's a simple and effective solution. 30 minutes might be a bit short, but certainly not more than 1 full minute.
So, you are advocating effectively eliminating a legitimate active playstyle in order to punish a few AFKers who abuse it, eh? Why not take it a step further and make all carrier pets stop fighting and return to the carrier after thirty seconds and require several minutes cooldown to rearm and be ready to manually re-launch? It is the same logic applied to the same "problem".
Right now, all the complaints are not only exaggerating the AFK problem by focusing so much attention on it, it is also getting some people to try AFKing for just for kicks, and like always the incidents of it will fall off as the novelty of the ship (and the avalanche of complaints about it) and its supposed ability to allow them to sit there twiddling their thumbs wears off.
People were making the same argument about the novelty of the ship a year ago. The ship has only become older, but especially during events like Swarm I tend to see it more often than just after most players obtained it. Neither of us can predict the future, but based on what we do know, time by itself is unlikely to fix the issue.
As for exaggerating: no one - again - suggested 'effectively eliminating an active playstyle'. That's not what limiting the uptime of this console/power would do.
This claim is basically the same as suggesting that a potential active playstyle has been eliminated because we haven't been given the option of having FAW active 100% of the time, after hitting spacebar once.
Actually, whether you realize it or not, you did suggest effectively eliminating an active playstyle, that of the bastion-type aura tank. The time limits you suggest would make it useless for its support role, especially in light of the very poor ingame communications in STO with its lack of ingame voice (and no, Discord and the others do not count since chances are almost nil that everyone on a team will have the same voice service and channel).
With that kind of digging-in aura tank the aura has to be up continuously until it is time to pull up stakes and move to the next location to dig in and open its umbrella of aid to teammates, it is not like a teammate can call out a warning that they are coming in hot and need help so the player with the jellyfish can get a short-time limited aura up while sending whatever other aid they can. And even if they could call out like that, chances are that by the time they got inside the aura it would not be up long enough to actually do the ally much good.
And in mobile mode the player with the jellyfish is probably too busy trying to maneuver and shoot things in a ship that (as an aura tank) is most likely not well rigged for conventional DPS combat to properly keep track of the other players, at least until they get dug in and the aura up again.
Sorry, I just don't see the problem of a max-uptime limitation. It may no longer be possible to have it active 100% of the time then, but that's precisely the idea.
It could still provide - for, say, 30 seconds each activation - significant boosts to your team. And it's not like most missions require a large AOE healing and damage effect 100% of the time. This may sound arrogant, but if other players on the team need that, they simply might need to get better.
Also, I assume it's an universal console. So there would be traits to reduce the cooldown. Even with, say, a 30 seconds active period and then 2 minutes lockout, you wouldn't necessarily have to wait 2 full minutes before you can use it again.
But that - and reactivating it - would require doing something else, which thus would effectively prevent AFK'ing.
Except that you are obviously thinking of it in a purely DPS sense and that is not its primary function. I take it you have never played in a game where they used specialty roles?
in a bastion type aura tank the dug-in mode is the PRIMARY mode, the mobile mode with the conventional weapons is mostly there to let it survive long enough to get to the next dig-in location. Its function is as an aid station and to either distract or thin the herd of trash mobs in the area it is set up in so damaged units coming in are not overwhelmed before they heal.
It is kind of like a Paladin or Cleric who jams their sword or staff into the ground and prays for an island of protection which stays up as long as they do not take crippling levels of damage but cannot move or use regular attacks while doing it (the player usually has some suite of buffs or similar to use while in that mode, like the Jellyfish with console clickys).
Timers negate the functionality of that kind of aura tank. In this case, the bubble mode means the aid station is open for business, and with the effective lack of voice a player cannot just say something like "I am damaged and coming in hot, get the bubble up!" to the tank player. The Jellyfish pilot may already be in tank mode, but if timered is probably in DPS mode and too busy fighting with a ship not meant for DPS to notice what the other ships are doing so chances are by the time the damaged ship gets there the reply might as well be "Oops, sorry, lunchtime is starting, and we will be open again shortly, come back later. Hmm, I think I will have the soup...).
This modal type of aura tank is rather uncommon in MMOs but it does exist, especially in games that dive deeper into combat roles than average and is probably the only type that can be done in STO that actually functions the way it is supposed to with the badly flawed aggro system this game has where no matter what you do the DPS units always get all the aggro.
It is funny how people complain about the damage the bubble does scratching trash mobs to death over time when most of the time there is a player or two in any TFO who fly around letting loose an avalanche of what looks like insanely dense cannon fire or mini torpedoes that pretty much instantly vaporizes everything in a large cone in front of them, and do it often enough that it frequently does not leave a lot for less-extremely equipped players to attack.
The bubble is only close to overpowered in a few patrols where you are defending something and have enough NPC allies to handle the bigger enemy ships while you take out the trash by the cartload, and most importantly NO OTHER PLAYERS ARE PRESENT TO TAKE AGRRO AWAY. And even for those patrols it is best to use a Cnidarian rigged for solo DPS instead of tank-rigged (and yes, this is one of those situations where the loadout system is actually good for something, or it is on the occasions that it actually works anyway, to reduce the aggravation of changing roles before going into the scenario).
Personally, I am starting to think that a lot of the objections to the bubble are actually visual, and that at least some of the complainers point to the damage as a backdoor attempt to get rid of the bubble visual.
This has become a circular argument that is going nowhere. /thread
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Six months later, that company nearly went under, and after they reorganized, the people who thought I wasn't "busy enough" were gone. Not saying there's a direct correlation there, but the data are suggestive.
A lot of the complaints here, though, do indeed boil down to "when the pink bubble is on, the jellyfish just sits there." Well, in a real-world navy, after launching its aircraft a carrier just sits there too - its weapons are entirely defensive. Does that make an aircraft carrier "AFK"?
Except that you are obviously thinking of it in a purely DPS sense and that is not its primary function. I take it you have never played in a game where they used specialty roles?
in a bastion type aura tank the dug-in mode is the PRIMARY mode, the mobile mode with the conventional weapons is mostly there to let it survive long enough to get to the next dig-in location. Its function is as an aid station and to either distract or thin the herd of trash mobs in the area it is set up in so damaged units coming in are not overwhelmed before they heal.
It is kind of like a Paladin or Cleric who jams their sword or staff into the ground and prays for an island of protection which stays up as long as they do not take crippling levels of damage but cannot move or use regular attacks while doing it (the player usually has some suite of buffs or similar to use while in that mode, like the Jellyfish with console clickys).
Timers negate the functionality of that kind of aura tank. In this case, the bubble mode means the aid station is open for business, and with the effective lack of voice a player cannot just say something like "I am damaged and coming in hot, get the bubble up!" to the tank player. The Jellyfish pilot may already be in tank mode, but if timered is probably in DPS mode and too busy fighting with a ship not meant for DPS to notice what the other ships are doing so chances are by the time the damaged ship gets there the reply might as well be "Oops, sorry, lunchtime is starting, and we will be open again shortly, come back later. Hmm, I think I will have the soup...).
This modal type of aura tank is rather uncommon in MMOs but it does exist, especially in games that dive deeper into combat roles than average and is probably the only type that can be done in STO that actually functions the way it is supposed to with the badly flawed aggro system this game has where no matter what you do the DPS units always get all the aggro.
It is funny how people complain about the damage the bubble does scratching trash mobs to death over time when most of the time there is a player or two in any TFO who fly around letting loose an avalanche of what looks like insanely dense cannon fire or mini torpedoes that pretty much instantly vaporizes everything in a large cone in front of them, and do it often enough that it frequently does not leave a lot for less-extremely equipped players to attack.
The bubble is only close to overpowered in a few patrols where you are defending something and have enough NPC allies to handle the bigger enemy ships while you take out the trash by the cartload, and most importantly NO OTHER PLAYERS ARE PRESENT TO TAKE AGRRO AWAY. And even for those patrols it is best to use a Cnidarian rigged for solo DPS instead of tank-rigged (and yes, this is one of those situations where the loadout system is actually good for something, or it is on the occasions that it actually works anyway, to reduce the aggravation of changing roles before going into the scenario).
Personally, I am starting to think that a lot of the objections to the bubble are actually visual, and that at least some of the complainers point to the damage as a backdoor attempt to get rid of the bubble visual.
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