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It where nice, when you can select a difficult for the Missions.
Like other MMOs STO is more easy than hard, so that beginners and not so skillful players have a chance to get an enemy down, but much players are better players and for this players the missions often are too easy.
So it where nice, when we players can select a hard difficult mode and have more or harder enemies in a mission.
This have two good effects:
1. more fun for a longer period for the players, when the normal difficult is too easy.
2. it relatively easy to build in, because at the moment the difficult is already different for the different team sizes.
A additional reward for complete in hard mode is not needed.
A other thing is the difficult of the enemies in the first levels. When you play a second character its much too easy to shoot down the enemies and its fast boring.
Like other MMOs STO is more easy than hard, so that beginners and not so skillful players have a chance to get an enemy down, but much players are better players and for this players the missions often are too easy.
So it where nice, when we players can select a hard difficult mode and have more or harder enemies in a mission.
This have two good effects:
1. more fun for a longer period for the players, when the normal difficult is too easy.
2. it relatively easy to build in, because at the moment the difficult is already different for the different team sizes.
A additional reward for complete in hard mode is not needed.
A other thing is the difficult of the enemies in the first levels. When you play a second character its much too easy to shoot down the enemies and its fast boring.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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So I add some of my thoughts here...
I also think the most missions are far too easy. With the right selection of skills you kill the most enemies very quick without being really challenged. I understand that the devs thought it is necessary to not offend the casual gamers who eventually never played an MMO or spacefight-based game before. But for me a game has to be challenging.
So my idea was a Hardcore-Mode with some important differences to normal game-mode. The first and maybe most important is a death-penalty which many players mentioned to be necessary to have a realistic gaming-experience. Other things that came to my mind are harder enemies (more hull/shields, more damage and or higher level enemies) or more enemies to make it easier to die and so far more challenging.
Contrary to Balmung I think there has to be an additional reward for getting through the hardcore-mode. The best possibility here would be a combination of better drops (maybe more rare items) and more skill points.
But the problem in getting more skill points would be that you will reach the level-top faster than other players with many missions less played than the average player. To avoid such problems there could be a checkbox in character creation just like in the good old Diablo II which makes a char an hc-char.
The (in my opinion) simplest way to manage the aforesaid problem would be to simply multiply the skill points needed to level up and the skill points you get from doing a mission with the same factor (like 1.5) and letting the cost for traits and skills at the same values as they are now. So you could take important advantages from playing the hardcore-mode by getting more skills than the normal player.
Needless to say that an hc-player should not be able to pvp versus a normal player
Conclusion: more challenging, more skill points, more fun for every player who needs to be hit hard :cool:
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I see a chance to combine this with a gold sink by the need to repair your items in this hc-mode. Or by the simple fact that repairing your hull eats up your energy-credits
I don't care about better rewards. I just want a challenge.
Yes I want more of a challenge. My proposal is for an easy implemention of a difficulty slider. No need to tinker with the loot tables. They follow the NPC levels quite ok already.
The goal for any MMO company is to find the balance between what is too easy and what is too difficult. but different modes is not the answer to that. For the average player, this can ruin their idea of rewarding gameplay because it makes them feel like if they can't handle "hard mode" they are not getting the full experience from the game which leads to canceled subscriptions.
If the game is too easy, the majority of players will chew through content quickly and get bored. This too leads to canceled subscriptions.
So the trick for Cryptic is to find the balance between the two. They have to make it challenging for the majority of players so they have some difficulty, but not so much as to overwhelm them into not wanting to play anymore. They must figure out what the majority of the players are experiencing, not the hardcore players or the super newbie players.
The old adage states that only 10% of an MMO's population reads and participate in a game's forums. And the majority of them would be considered the upper tier of the playing population. So it is not necessarily what the forum users are clamoring for in terms of difficulty, but what the internal numbers of the game are showing how players are faring in the live world. These numbers are unknown to us as players, but could be as simple as a graph showing the distribution of the population's amount of mission completion to something far more complex.
I agree some aspects of the game need to be tuned upwards a bit in the difficulty curve. But then again I, like most of you, am an MMO veteran and have been playing for years. Naturally the game will come easier to us than most. So my perspective maybe too skewed to reflect where the general population of the players are.
Finally, Open Beta is not as good as an indicator to show where a game is in terms of difficulty. The difference between a population playing for free and a population paying money are quite different. So I would venture to guess that this is the time that Cryptic has picked to begin adjusting content difficulty with a more diverse crowd of paying customers.
I agree it should be here too. They already have the tech to do it. It'd be nice to see.
Reward isn't an issue. Tougher and/or more numerous enemies provide more skill points and better loot drops naturally, with no tweaking necessary to the current loot tables (apart from the tweaking that already needs to be done to the current loot tables, i.e. a "batteries not included" update, light on the cannons, thanks).
A difficulty slider is not a bad idea, so long as the minimum level is no harder than current.
In the meantime, there's always "Manual" Hardcore: If your ship is destroyed, even once, delete the character and start a new one.
Run a character to Admiral playing that way, and you've got some serious bragging rights.
As to whether people will believe you, well, that's a different challenge.