Before anyone says that I'm biased either way.
I have a Captain Fed and a Captain Klingon.
I've been playing from Day one, but I prefer to slowly level rather than get to the max level and having nothing but PVP to look forward to for anything else left to do.
I understand the need for things like the Salvage yard PVP map to be harder for Klingon's to hold because it compensates out for their having battle cloaks that the Fed side doesn't get. They can and often do, hide cloaked as they make plans who to take out first before they decloak and go after that player.
I mean when you can cloak and uncloak at will and basically get out of combat with it, it makes it harder for the forces to spread around to know where your at and make plans of their own when they don't even know who's there or what type of ship they have. That is an advantage for only one side.
That being said,
Why is it that
both sides, most often science officers but not always, able to expose players so easily?
I just tried to PVP on "both" sides the better part of yesterday and I gave up when the standard fare was "Hold/Expose/Exploit/Rinse/Repeat". There was one battle where we were trying to hold a room and the other side came in behind us to flank us. I was going to give them props for hold us there with 3 players while two others came up from behind, but that was until the science officer exposed all five of us at the same time and then exploited it with a split beam rifle. :mad:
While I know is rare, it is not uncommon to spend the better part of a game either frozen or exploited. Or to have two or more players exposed and the player who did it armed with a split beam rifle to take advantage of it.
I don't like stun guns because you can put two in your weapons slots and then spend time switching between them to keep stunning a player and over again as crowd control to keep them out of a battle while your side takes out one or two others. I know because that kept happening to me in one game
And even I can get past that, but I can't understand how a player can expose player after player after player like that and Cryptic not see that as unfair. How are you supposed to fight "anyone" if you spend the better part of all battles exposed, stunned, and waiting to die?
Some folks on youtube even made a video to show how often and easy it is to do it over and over again. It's not a "rare" attack at all for some players. And this is what my day yesterday looked like for every game I played until I got fed up and quit later in the afternoon. :eek:
Click here for video for link to Expose chance on youtube
And before some of you start off with the "You are just having observer error" I can name two players "one in particular" who when he/she logs on the team against them always says "Watch out he's an freeze exploit player". I have had entire teams leave games refusing to play with those players.
I'm just curious if this is going to be fixed or if I just need to give up ground based PVP combat because I spend most of my time frozen and exposed with no way to limit it, or have it effected by some form of diminishing returns when a player does nothing but use that over and over and over again in every game they play. I've seen things eluding to shared timers, but nothing addressing the rate of how often this should be possible.

I can see it as a random thing or something where a player gets lucky, but its not a form of game play that gets old really fast.
Comments
EDIT : Actually I've done some ground PvP on tribble now and it's still a hold/expose/exploit-fest.
And actually held my own. 5 wins, 5 defeats. With fists. On an Engineer.
lol
Very poor pvp mechanics.
Rather.
I managed to hold off a pair all by my lonesome using a mixture of stasis field, tachyon harmonic and disruptor rifles with expose and exploit effects on my Science officer. It was 3:1 until they got savvy and started working together to kill me.
The broken queue finally gave up another two players for me to team with and the match was neck and neck.
We won, barely.
Just one timer on weapons speical attacks.
How would you explain that? "Sorry, cant use the sniper function on the rifle since I used the stun setting on my phaser!" "damn those ferengi union members!"
no, exploit needs to be reworked. there is no way around that. there also needs to be a stat on armor that helps reduce the chance of it and crits.
You don't have to explain it. Players shouldn't be able to kill two players in row with exploit kills by switching weapons. It can be game mechanics. This isn't real it's a game. There is no Star Fleet or klingon empire.
With that view point then Cryptic wouldent have to explain putting in a DP, after all there is no Starfleet, no Klingon empire. It isnt real. its just a game.
I really thought you were a litte better at trolling than the other two. I'm sorry I was wrong. This thread is about exposed/expolit kills.The death penalty issue is in another thread.
I'm sure that is wasn't intended for two science officers. To be able to kill four people in around three to five seconds. It seems it would be alot easier to get right with one cooldown for special attacks on weapons. It seems trying to balance it with armor would be much harder. If the one cooldown on speical attacks didn't reduce expolit kills enough you could go from there.
Wasent trolling, was providing a counter point. I'm sorry you cant tell that. I was using your defense of one game mechanic to provide the view point on this one. It was intended for them to be packing two weapons however (or eles we wouldent have that function), and one would assume cryptic isnt stupid and didnt think that people would be packing both an expose weapon and an exploit weapon. They already fixed the bug where you can swap weapons out from the inventory. No the problem dosent lie in using two weapons it lies in the actual mechanics of how a target is exposed. At the moment its too high, lower that base chance and you wont need to mess with the weapons.
Thats what i was getting at.
Also please refrain from insulting people. I didnt insult you and I dont expect to be insulted back by being called a 'troll'
I "HATE" quitting a match. I would prefer to tough it out and at least take some with me. But if that's all they are going to do to win, then YES I WILL QUIT! That's just lame! Sorry terrifically frustrated here
And my Klingon is one of those free kills. I'm one of the rare players who likes the hand to hand of TAC officers, but this is crazy. I can't get close enough and I'm always exposed/stunned/exploited before I can fight back.
Klingon players only have PVP to level and this one exploited aspect of the game is making it as a lame way to just stand in place and get owned :mad:
I'm sorry you feel I insulted you. I did not call you troll. Calling someone a troll and saying they are trolling are two different things. Misquoting someone could even be considered trolling or flame/baiting.
I think the real reason you have two weapons is for a melee weapon and a ranged weapon. You always here game makers say that something didn't work as intended. That doesn't mean that Cryptic is stupid. They were under lots of pressure to meet a dead line. I don't think they intended for Science officers to kill that many people that quickly. Sometimes this happens in games. There are other problems in other areas of the game. Thats dosen't mean that they are stupid either because of an unseen problem.
That would seem to be a simple fix. That would cut down on exploit kills. Armor would not need to be modified or a cooldown added.
Holds are cannon in Star Trek. How many times, after all, have we seen Kirk, or one of the other captains and their BOs frozen by an enemy? Of course, what happens next? They're imprisoned. Why? Because once you put a hold on someone, you've won the fight.
In PvP, against equal characters, it's a cheap mechanic. I REALLY wish I could grab the devs and put them through some CQB and firearm courses. Because I don't think many of them know what the heck a real fight is. I really wish they'd either do away with the holds, or make them considerably weaker. It is just no fun to enter a match and get held by 3 people, froze by two, then exploit attacked by all 5 at once. And to see this happen over and over? REALLY not fun.
on a side note i was playing with a dev in shanty town and i tried to spend the whole time constantly rifle butting him which i think is another annoying feature since that also can expose the target.
I too agree the holds are out of control. I don't think any player should be able to exploit kill two people in a row. I like the fact that you can expose kill someone. It mixes things up a little. Switching from two weapons with stuns on a science officer to is a problem. Not only does he have his holds he can stun with his weapons too. Then you throw in the fact a Vulcan can add two holds to that if he wants with Nerve Pinch and Mind Meld it's crazy.
This was my "Flamed" response. I did not DEMAND anything, I asked a simple question, how would you explain it.
This is what YOUR reply was.
To which i replied
which was providing a counter to your argument. I chose this simply because it was a subject you posted the most about on these forums, no other reason. To say the least I was kinda insulted by you telling me "Its just a game" like i already for some reason had no idea it wasent. I brushed it off and kept my mouth shut.
Then you reply:
so please tell me where it was I flamed your post or insulted you, hell show me where it was i was trolling.
This is why people are afraid to post in the forums. I have no reason why i would report you, sure I could but I dont operate like that. I dont go around calling people "Troll' or say they are trolling if their opinon is diffrent than mine, thats the whole reason for the forums, is to share view points and ideas.
Tac officers are not free kills. On my fed tac officer I routinely end a match with 20 + kills to a half dozen deaths at most. My last pvp match I ended up with 35 kills 2 deaths. There is nothing wrong with tac's, most people just put all their abilities into space. You pick the right race/trait combination and put points in to ground pvp and tac's are just fine.
However i do agree with the op. There are matches where you just don't fare as well. I usually always break even on kills in those cases. Maybe die a couple more times then i kill or vice versa. However in every case it's due to it's quickly discovered how good a person is on the ground. Personally I hate space pvp. It's way too imbalanced. I seem to be the opposite of the mass popularity of space pvp. I prefer ground. Klinks can't just cloak and run away in ground combat.
All three of my characters are have a good combination of space and ground traits. Two klinks and 1 fed. I ground pvp 90 percent and space 10 percent. Here is the problems i see. There is the ability to exploit stuns, holds and exposes. One person replied on here he faired better with his hands. There is a reason for that. It is very easy to spam melee and stunn a person very quickly. This can be used in combination. Example of this most people run around with a phaser stun weapon and a weapon with a good expose.
Here is an example. Most individuals are running with a phaser stun weapon and either a sniper rilfe or splitbeam. They stunn you with the phaser and quickly switch to the sniper/split beam. If your exposed your dead. The thing with phaser stunns is the expose isn't always instant and the holds can vary. So it's not an instant thing. Here is the problem though. The hold refresh timer is at times much longer than the refresh timer on the phaser stun. If that doesn't work you can run right up to the person and start spamming melee. In most cases spamming rifle seems to be the biggest melee exploit cause they proc stunns/holds faster then even bat'lehs. However spamming bat'lehs also proc stunns pretty fast cause you can pull combo's with them pretty damn fast.
So you see even with just weapons it is fairly easy to keep a person stunned for 20 seconds or more just to beat them down. Sometime during this period you will become exposed. This is the reason I now run with telekentics on all my characters. After i am stunned the first option i always turn to is that to knock them back and get them off me. However the cool down on that ability is pretty long. So I only get the chance to use it once during the fight. Either I die or they do before it refreshes again. Now i will adress kits.
Kits it's easy to keep a person stunned forever in combination with everything i just explained above. Especially science officers. Will get to that in a moment. Take my fed i mentioned for example. I always choose a kit with stunn grenades. So i run with a phaser stun, sniper, and stunn grenades. You can see pretty quickly how long i can keep a person stunned. Here is just one attack combo available to me. Stun with phaser, switch to sniper, no expose, blast em to do heavy damage, switch back to phaser, stunn them again. If the timer hasn't refreshed, run up to them and turn to melee, spam rifle butt to keep them stunned, if that happenes to fail and they start fighting back, hit teleknetics to knock them back and instantly hit them with a stunn grenade. All the time just waiting for that expose. I win 90 percent of my 1v1 unless coming up against another really good ground pvp'r and then it just comes down to who maybe slightly faster on the keyboard and what proc's first for whom.
Even with the tactics i listed above it's easy to exploit abilities coded into the game. However their are two problems that arise with this. One, there are abilities, usually science ablilites that hold and expose a person instantly every time. I encountered a science officer that kept shooting a beam from his helmet and I became held and exposed instantly every time. The one thing I did notice it seemed to have a long refresh timer but every time he used it the person was instantly held and exposed. This also happens with stasis field and other science abilities. Which leads to the other situation.
The vast majority of the time I get killed a lot is i am singled out. If you have a smart team they will always assist each other and all target one person at a time. You either get singled out because your a good player and they take you out first, or your the weakest player and they just know they can take you out of the equation quickly. So one of two things happen here. First with spawns and respawns.
I spawn into a game and just as often as not I spawn right into several players of the opposite side. Or you die and spawn right back or very close to the same group that just killed you. So you die multiple times. Each case it's the same. I see klinks using this tactic more than fed's. Not blaming any one side i have two klinks and do the same thing.
The instant you are stunned/ held imeadiately at least two of them run up to you, if not all of them and just start spamming melee.. You then have 0 chance of ever not becoming unstunned and when you do it's just a hair second before being stunned again untill your exposed. I'm usually dead withing seconds. The other situation obviously is when your in a fight and ever player on the opposite side starts targeting you with weapons. You got 4 or more people focused on just you and you can remained stunned permantely untill your instantly exposed or dead. Unless your team is just as good your in for a long match.
this is getting quite long so i will try to adress the last two issues quickly. The first of which is just the UI itself. Many times the camera is your worst enemy. There are many times it just won't release on the target I choose. No matter how much i try to hit clear target, or any button to switch to the next enemy, closest enemy, previous enemy it just gets stuck. I would like to meet the individual who mapped the clear target button to the same button, escape, as the bring up hud. 90 precent of the time it brings up the hud, 10 percent of the time it actually clears my target. So if i get flanked or a enemy runs up behind me it can be difficult to clear your target and engage that one. Even hitting tab to cycle through all the enemies can take too long. Then don't even get me started on the camera.
Then there is the times where i target an enemy, have them at my advantage try to run up to them. I suddenly find myself running backwards when i push forward. Everything suddenly gets reversed. There are times where i am aiding my team working on targets and back right into a group of enemies. This suddenly change of polarity drives me insane.
Lastly is the map itself. It can be impossible to make it back to a team before your ganked simply because you can see where your enemy is on the map. I personally feel you shouldn't be able to just pop open your map and see where your enemy is. No element of surprise, you know where everyone is at all times. This allows for very few set battles. No one really bothers setting up area's to defend. You just kill, pop up your map and rush to the next spot you see individuals spawn in. that option needs to be removed. I feel you shouldn't be able to see where your enemies are on the map. It's just silly.
Anyway sorry so long.
I have seen players, and done this myself, Drop their weapons, go from a crouched aiming position and stand straight up and heal all the way back to full health while taking direct hits and depleted shields. Possible in 1v1, maybe. Though i seen an occasion the other day a female enemy who was so close to death she probably needed cpr, i mean a hair away from dying, stand straight up and heal all the way back to full at the same time she was blasted with 4 energy beams from 4 different people.
A tad bit unrealistic me thinks.
This isn't gameplay in any sense of the word.
It's broken, simple.
Tac officers are actually at a disadvantge if they can't employ the hold mechanics as well. Go figure.
Basically if you can't hold you can't win.
1. Your first response was argumentative. You tried to dismiss it entirly. With a ridiculous analogy about a Ferengi. I gave my opinion I don't have to explain it but I did. Killing two people in a row with expose kills is unfair to me. What you did was trolling.
2. See it's not an argument. These boards aren't supposed to be arguments. You see my post and attack it twice. Then try to bait me to a different subject which is called trolling.
3, I have to agree with you there it's pointless. You can report me but I didn't do anything. Telling you that you aren't trolling very good. When it's clear you are trolling. Well I don't think that banable. If it is I will accept my ban. When you're called out for what you're doing. You become the victim and say you were insulted.
4. The point of the forums are to share veiws. Not to be in attacked constantly. Flame and dismiss post. To argue then switch the subject. To something is that is in different thread. This is not a place for people to argue. On there rules they say this isn't a debate club.
See I am right back to having to defend myself again. The way it's been from my very first post.
Ive also had times on my engineer where i've engaged 3 people at once and was able to kill them all between the combination of cover shield, shield recharge, weapon malfunction, fuse armor, and having telekinesis. You throw in an aoe cone expose weapon with a knockback and you're on easy street.
It will be interesting to see how the stealth changes affect tactical officers in ground combat, theoretically it will be a nice addition to have a toggled stealth, especially since the same kit comes with an extra expose/damage debuff attack to accompany fire on my mark. That being said theres still a lot of problems to attend to.
As it stands right now its no where near being the fire fights you see in any episode or movie, and realistically the likelihood of the cc abilities being toned down is possible i don't see them being removed or being completely countered. I think you could ad a default ability to all kits that allows for a mechanic to remove cc, and have the cooldown be reasonable. Additionally you could increase player health to make it less of a one and done approach to fighting, and with the way npcs hit in pve it wouldnt be to jeopardizing to end game content.
I was on my science officer and a tactical officer. Used his stealth ambushed me. Then stunned me with a phaser. Then he rifle butted until he got an expose then one shotted me. I was stun locked the whole time nothing I could do. That was more than five seconds I think.
The camera is another real problem in groud PVP. It's stays locked on your target. Even if you switch the camera to free camera. Even if you click on nothing it take a second or to two for it to spin back. So if you pop out to use a special attack on someone from behind cover. It's hard to get back in because you have to back pedal with the camera locked. Or click nothing wait for the camera to spin and try to roll back. Most times you just end up rolling out. In either case a real good chance you're going to get stunned and exposed killed.
The camera seems like the dissable target lock is broken in the ground game. I have even unchecked the face target off screen this doesn't help either. Nothing I do will increase the rate it swings back.
It is good for hiding your minimap pointer and ambushing that way however. Also, if the opponent isn't paying attention you might get overlooked as they pass but that would be due to pure absent-mindedness on the opponents part. If your using cloak in a firefight between groups your just making yourself a target and not helping the firefight.
Also, if the opponents are having firing click-fest, you won't get the chance to use ambush since you'll get hit before you can use it. Not a bad nerf, its no longer the insta-escape power it was and its more strategic in function, just could use some tweaking with the detection distance and modification to Ambush to allow it to break Cloak and potentially be usable or work in a different manner all together.
Edit: on second thought Im just dropping it, its not worth having to argue about. You go pretend to be the injured party, i dont really care anymore. People can read the posts before and come up with their own opinon on the matter.
To the rest: sorry about us going off topic.
On the pvp equipment add (In addition to other stats) Expose/Exploit resistance. Increase the resistance per tier of armor. Exploit resistance would lower the damage caused by an exploit attack, Expose resistance would lower the chance of being Exposed.
Add +% resistants to holds, nothing sucks more than being chain held and having no defense against it.
This would keep it in pvp without an outcry of "OMG! they nerfed PVE!" and also give the pvp armors something a bit more to help them (and be worthwhile) in pvp, the changes to the armor also wouldent effect pve since you cant be exposed and exploited in pve.
just like CO became. which I quit because of. it's a TRIBBLE game mechanic
I have a nasty suspicion that what'll end up happening is that taking the holds out of the exposes will only make melee spam and science kit holds even more common