I do feel for the OP. My feelings on Infected are pretty similar (although I quite enjoy the ground combat in the game). I've so far only played it once, it took 4 hours, and the last room was an exercise in frustration due to the jumping.
My main complaint though, was that after all that, I had precious little to show for it. The only 2 "Borg" drops were grabbed by other team members, so from my perspective I went through 4 hours of game time I really didn't enjoy, and didn't even have any particularly great rewards to show for it. The whole experience left me fairly unwilling to run Infected again, and I'm not in too big a hurry to do any of the other STFs (which I wouldn't attempt anyway unless I was comfortable with Infected, since I've read enough on the forums to know they're harder).
I'm really glad they're adding the new rewards to the STFs, but I'd like to see something else added. If everyone in the team had gotten a Borg drop or something when I'd run it, I might've felt I'd had gotten something for my trouble. As it was, the whole experience was 4 hours where I wished I'd just run through some dailies and got my Marks/Emblems instead.
I do feel for the OP. My feelings on Infected are pretty similar (although I quite enjoy the ground combat in the game). I've so far only played it once, it took 4 hours, and the last room was an exercise in frustration due to the jumping.
My main complaint though, was that after all that, I had precious little to show for it. The only 2 "Borg" drops were grabbed by other team members, so from my perspective I went through 4 hours of game time I really didn't enjoy, and didn't even have any particularly great rewards to show for it. The whole experience left me fairly unwilling to run Infected again, and I'm not in too big a hurry to do any of the other STFs (which I wouldn't attempt anyway unless I was comfortable with Infected, since I've read enough on the forums to know they're harder).
I'm really glad they're adding the new rewards to the STFs, but I'd like to see something else added. If everyone in the team had gotten a Borg drop or something when I'd run it, I might've felt I'd had gotten something for my trouble. As it was, the whole experience was 4 hours where I wished I'd just run through some dailies and got my Marks/Emblems instead.
I did Infected with members of my fleet who have all done it before.
We have Ventrillo (that thing that allows you to talk over the Internet - who new I didn't - you can gauge my degree of noobness from this alone) that helped alot.
Because we worked as a team and followed one persons lead (the Fleet Admiral/leader) I found Infected fun and enjoyable and cannot wait for the Terrordrome and The Cure.
Infected did take a long time though, very long, but apparently we did it quite quickly according to the others in my team. I'm pretty sure that had I attempted it with all first timers it wouldn't have been as enjoyable, less so if players charge ahead and/or won't follow team instructions.
So I had a go at Infected today. Finally found a group of 5 people that I was able to join up with, and we all started from the begining.
Now, before I go any further, I'll be forward with a few disclosures. I don't like ground combat in this game. I find it dull, tedious, and repetitive. I enjoy space combat (pve and pvp) and all of my skills are focused in space combat. I have 0 points in ground skills. I realize that might make ground combat a bit more difficult, but until they tie together ship skills and ground skills, there's not much I can do. My second disclosure is I don't like groups. I enjoy the single player aspect of the game and while I do enjoy multiplayer fleet engagements and pvp, I don't group up to do a mission.
That aside, I was looking forward to Infected. When I first heard about it, a 5 man mission seemed fine. I figured that perhaps if I couldn't get 4 other friends, I could find 2 or 3 other people and take it nice and slow. I thought that a full 5 man group would have a lot of fun, we would all get some loot, and things would be good.
I was wrong.
The initial space combat was enjoyable at first. The borg ships were much more challenging than normal, and that is fine. The first cube we killed dropped a nice MK X Graviton Deflector. Another player got a MK X Disruptor Array. Awesome.
It all went downhill from there.
We spent a good 20-30 minutes killing probes, shooting the gate, killing probes, shooting the gate, killing sheres, shooting the gate.... until finally killing cubes, shooting the gate. The process was so boring and tiresome that I honestly felt like leaving there. However I stuck through it until the Tactical cube appeared. We killed his buddy cube, and after another 5-10 minutes, we killed the cube. Unfortunately no loot as the player tagged to pick it up died in the Cube's explosion, and didn't make it back to pick up his rare drop before we were transported planetside (only a 30 second window)
I know if that drop had been gold instead of grey, I would have been very upset.
So we arrive on the station. Ground combat starts. I don't like ground combat but I'm a good sport and I set up my turrets and drones and start tapping between the 1 and 2 buttons on my keyboard. We make some progress, die trying to kill the nodes. Repeat. The constant root/holds are annoying. As is the insane volume of HP the Borg have. And the numbers, so many in each section.
But it gets worse, because it keeps going. and going. and going.
We finally get to an interesting room with an assimilated captain. I don't see the captian though, because he endes up walking behind the platform. After 5 minutes of trying to get to a spot we could shoot him, we kill him and are then killed by the newly arriving borg because we're stuck in a corner. But we stick with it! We're all good sports and we find the console, lower the shield, and keep going.
More Borg. More groups. More nodes to destroy. more spamming the 1 and 2 buttons on our keyboards until finally, we reach a room full of boxes, plasma, and consoles.
This is the point I could not take any more.
Our group leader was a veteran of this mission and explained the trick. Jump over the boxes to each of the 4 corners. Then 3 people must activate the console at the same time, then upload a virus, then repeat. It sounds convoluted, because it is, but I'm a good sport so I roll with it.
After 30 minutes I have had enough. People keep falling into plasma because they can't jump, or they get shot in mid air and are knocked in. Then we all have to die because if you can't be resurrected and make it out of the plasma, you have to respawn, and you are locked out of the room if you do that. After several attempts, people get better at jumping (though it's still easy to TRIBBLE up). So we focus on the consoles. Well 2 players are bugged and can't see the center console on the first platform, and activating at the same time requires serious attention and coordination, but we stick with it, and manage to lower 3 platform shields!!
But that is as far as we got. The same failings kept repeating, people began to leave the group, and they could not be replaced with new members. Even eager friends outside the instance could not be brought in to join us. We attempted again and again to clear all 4 platforms, but could not get more than 3 before they began to reset. Eventually, after almost 3 hours of my time wasted, I transported out.
Upon refection, I decided to write this my first post on the forums, with these 3 conclusions:
1) This game does not lend itself well precise timing. Jumping gets less difficult as you do it, but there are too many variables to TRIBBLE you up. Same thing with precision activation of consoles. Getting your character oriented correctly, hitting the F key or mouse click on time is difficult.
2) More hit points does not always make something more challenging. It can also make it just more annoying or more of a time sink. Both the space and ground combat in this mission are leaps and bounds more difficult simply because everything has so much more HP. There are other ways to make a fight hard or challenging other than making us hit the 1 & 2 keys more and more and more.
3) The entire process takes way to long. This mission requires so much time and repetition I got bored before I got frustrated.
Now I know forums. I know some of the responses I might get to this post. I know lots of other people have done this mission, and might even like it. I know if we had more time and experience we might get better at it. I know that I probably sound like Capt. QQ More of the USS LEARNTOPLAY.
But regardless of that, this mission does not scale well from the previous 45 levels of game play. Having done every other mission, every fleet deployment, ever pvp map, every exploration mission, I can honestly say that nothing I have done previously in the game could prepare me for that mission. Not in terms of skills (no other pve mission had jump challenges) not in terms of button coordination (they were all soloable except fleet and pvp, and that required teamwork but not to that level of activating consoles) and not in terms of time (Long and drawn out pvp matches are usually fun, and worth the effort for a "gg")
And ultimately what are the rewards? I'm not sure, as we didn't get a single drop in the ground mission, and I don't know what a Mark of Valor is for.
I can only conclude if these 5 man missions are going to be the only new content going forward, I and many other people will be stuck at level 45, doing the same PVP and PVE Exploration missions until we are bored to quit. I'm already upset that it looks like I can't do the next mission, The Cure, unless I finish Infected.
Maybe I'll try again one day, but not today.
Once I became able to do these missions I began. I've completed this missions over a dozen times now and of course, like your experiences, done various parts of it with a larger number of teams that all ended up the same.
The consoles in the last room sometimes will not show the option to press them. You have to move away and back to them, and hope you are in the right place and it will allow itself to be seen, sometimes several times, or trade the console with another player, all the while the clock is ticking away.
Nothing is worse then getting shot mid-jump and falling in and having to say to everyone. I died, we all need to start over.
And finally, the end. I think the queen drops at most 3 items. A purple, which I've gotten twice. A blue and a green. So after all of that, and the hours of play you mention, not even the entire team gets an award for the effort. And at our level xp is meaningless.
It is more a mission of endurance then skill which I'm finding many of the options left at VA level are. But at least you can complete it. I've yet to finish The Cure for reasons like this one and apparently Terradome has two seperate bugs that prevent you from succeeding. Only one of which I've reached and been faced with.
1. Have a vent Channel
2. Have at least 3 Eng with phaser turrets and Q mortors (most on cure on KA better to have force fleid kit)
3. having ppl you know and trust becuase other wise you SOL
Btw i have done KA with out a sci officer it was ways easy to tell you the true KA is the easiest
if you ask me, and for everone who says cure suxs it does, and i havent seen Terrordome it was fun till my fleet and i got to the engieener protecting part then we were done so i hope that gets better when they fix it
I got to that same room managed to upload the virus to the consoles and when I reached the last console and uploaded virus the field went up before it finished uploading (before the progress bar filled up)
I kind of agree that isn't not exactly the most exiting mission (the episodes are 100x more fun). I want those Borg pieces though. Too bad my computer dies every time I play for too long these days.
Right all games must be targeted at hard core raiders, bought this game because it was casual oriented. I certainly hope they don't take this game in a direction that makes you happy... I would be VERY unhappy.
I love Star Trek... Its about good story, not the super mario garbage that is in the last room in this mission. Again love what they have done everywhere in this game except the the LAME missions with WEAK story that are the STF's so far. I mean where are my rocket boots like the borgish queenish wth story that is in Infected so I don't have to bounce around the room, and hope to god I wouldn't get rubber banded into the plasma. The game's tech doesn't support this kind of coordinated bunny hop, at least not well. (too much lag for this sort of thing) The borg would not have open plasma pits, my god neither would the federation, where the hell does that fit story-wise, in a word it doesn't.
If you want a hard game then go get a hard game. I for one like the content and play style of the original game and these goofy un star trek missions just do not belong here. I pray the dev's stick to Star Trek and leave the wow'ish epeen garbage to wow.
I beat the mission, its not a difficult mission, its just a stupid one, with way the hell too many technical issues. Doesn't fit the lore, that should be the first test of what is in game. I agree with the original poster the mission sucks. So maybe you should read the actual content of peoples complaints before you trollishly hammer them for their opinion.
well said. however i say that infected is annoying and near to impossible. until cryptic replace those platforms with brigdes i'm doing pvp until i hit RA upper half lvl 2 and do terradome.
I got to that same room managed to upload the virus to the consoles and when I reached the last console and uploaded virus the field went up before it finished uploading (before the progress bar filled up)
This is a bug. If someone leaves the platform before the upload is complete, the shield will go back up. Just make sure that everyone stays on the platform until it is done uploading. If you make a mistake and the shield bugs on you, you can reset by doing a team wipe.
well said. however i say that infected is annoying and near to impossible. until cryptic replace those platforms with brigdes i'm doing pvp until i hit RA upper half lvl 2 and do terradome.
Doubt Cryptic is going put in bridges. If you think Infected is impossible, wait till you try Cure or Khitomer. But really, there are a number of threads now about how to complete Infected. It's a team effort, and requires a proper strategy. Much like PVP, if you expect to just go on in and faceroll the mission like 95% of STO, in the words of Stromshade, "it's time to wake up and smell the disruptor burns."
Terradome, however, has some major bugs that will prevent mission completion in many cases. I would run this mission with this expectation.
Why the thread necro? There are a ton of more recent posts about the STF's ever since the borg gear came out.
This is a bug. If someone leaves the platform before the upload is complete, the shield will go back up. Just make sure that everyone stays on the platform until it is done uploading. If you make a mistake and the shield bugs on you, you can reset by doing a team wipe.
Infected IS FUN. IF some of the PUGS I have joined can do it. So can you. I tend to be on most of the day toss me a whisper ill get a team going and we can do it.
Im getting tired of these threads. I join a team with guys who have done it and failed miserably lots of times and i join it and say. "shoot the nodes." "no u dont need to run in and shoot all the nodes in the room 1 at time" "Dont rush this isnt a race" and when we finsh all i hear is Wow this is so much easier than before. I guess I just needed to know what to do.
I run infected with 4 motion accel kits, 4 bunker fab kits, and 4 medic kits. and im a science officer. They obviously arent for me. When people dont know what to do they get frustrated.
Which is why I spent the last and will continue spending time looking for those frustrated people. Who cant get infected done and show them one way of doing it.
I also see randeon at night doing that also. And a few other. I URGE those who have trouble with the infected to do a few things.
1.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_s0SkARQUY Watch it.
2.http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=196118 Read it. Ask questions.
3. Make a thread somewhere asking if some experienced people would be willing to make a group and teach you the ins and outs of infected. **I would hop on this faster than a blonde on.... not appropriate.
4. Go in gamma and ask for help. I cant gaurantee people will help but it never hurt to ask.
5. PM ME
I could understand if this was the cure but infected. no. just no.
You obviously have no clue how to run that mission and neither did your friends. Send me a line sometime and I'll take you through that whole thing in less than 45 minutes.
My fleet and I have done infected a few times. Sure the first time you go in "you have no idea what's goin' on." But after banging your head against the wall a few times you start to learn how to play. It takes coordination and skill and that's what I enjoy about it. The fact that it is considered too hard makes me feel even better about being to complete with relative ease. Hell, we didn't even realize until a week ago that our Borg kill order was backwards and we still did fine.
My advice is to find a good fleet and try it on some kind of VOIP software.
Infected is fun. I've done a lot of MMO raids and dungeons and whatever in my day. STO has challenging and fun content. Don't blame Cryptic's design when you can't beat something.
Ok I read through the all the post now I am adding my two cent. I have three pieces of advice.
1. Join a fleet that runs the STF's regularly
2. Get Vent or Team speak
3. Listen and work as a team.
If you do those three things you will get through the stf's just fine. Fleets do it everyday many times over. Quit relying on pugs.
If you can follow instructions and listen to the team leader you will get through it in no time. The gate in infected can be brought down the 1st time. If you didnt get any loot tell the team lead to put loot on need or greed (you got shafted there). Thetact cube the gate if you dont destroy the transformer and the Boss rebecca always drop good loot. The gate and rebecca drop the purple gear. If you dont like ground combat and are not willing to spec just a few points in your ground class your going to hate the STF's. Infected, The Cure, and KA have their bugs but fleets run these successfully all the time. If you dont want to do these things then good luck getting through them.
Lastly when you do finish Infected instead of leaving practice your jumping skills. It will pay off.
Lastly when you do finish Infected instead of leaving practice your jumping skills. It will pay off.
QFT! This can not be expressed enough. You can not and will not always be allowed to just sit in the middle. One day will come where your help will be needed doing the jumping. Practice makes perfect. I have gotten to the point that I can literally run and jump all obstacles. Came from running that mission so many times I could do it with my eyes closed.
Like i said earlier though, if you want a guy who can run you guys through that in less than 45 minutes, give me a tell in game and I will be happy to show you and your friends the ropes.
I did Infected for the first time yesterday and overall I had fun, although I was surprised by how long it took. (We finished in about 3 hours and I was told we made good time.) Also I'm really glad we had some Infected veterans along to explain the last room, because it would have been a nightmare trying to figure that out if it were new to all five of us.
It was pretty fun, though. I enjoyed that it was never just a straight "kill everything" mission and there were always other goals, like destroying the conduit and the nodes, and then the final room, if a little involved, was a great finish. A teammate and I stayed on the center platform and shot at Borg while the others hopped around to the corners. It really felt like we had a specific role, and it was cool seeing the team leader's instructions going by in the chat as they tried to flip the switches.
Still, I'm not sure if I'll be doing that again soon, at least not in one go. The space section and then the long battle across the top level of the station seemed to drag on and on. People say that the other STFs take even longer, too... I'll have to clear out a weekend if that's the case.
Yup its fun just gotta know what your doing, take a little time but u wil become a better player overall. And this is one of the few hardcore things star trek has going for it so please dont cry nerf:)
Still, I'm not sure if I'll be doing that again soon, at least not in one go. The space section and then the long battle across the top level of the station seemed to drag on and on. People say that the other STFs take even longer, too... I'll have to clear out a weekend if that's the case.
I don't think the other ones really take that much longer. But they do suffer from the same too much filler, too much doing the same thing over and over factor. Makes 'em tedious and lowers the fun level.
I just finished trying to run two different PuG Infected teams, and I can see why you are having a tough time.
I asked until I was blue in the face to please minimize all pop ups after the first Borg mob was destroyed...I'll be damned if both times I tried to run Infected that *somebody* hit continue instead of minimizing the pop ups. First run somebody fired at and destroyed the Transmitter.
This is probably why you guys had such a hard time. Somebody on a PuG team always seems to go against the grain and they TRIBBLE it up. Unfortunately I had to drop both teams.
I'm sure it's been said, but it's a little too late in the day and I've had a few beers too much to trawl through the replies, but in my opinion infected is the easiest of them all, it just gets worse.
I was with a team that got all the way to the end of the cure but couldn't finish it because we were short a healer to go melle the last boss. As another poster put it, there is not enough of these mission types throughut the game to prepare you for these. Anybody who has played WoW and can remember the deadmines will tell you the same thing. 5 man instances should be a little challenging, but not unforgiving, especially the first ones, and frankly these are just way to unforgiving.
We all know that ground combat isn;t as polished as the space combat, and personally I would like to see more space combat than ground combat in these missions, it's what everybody is used to and can play better at. Right now it really is too much of a grind and too much wipe tedium. hell I've played end game raids in WoW, and yes, whilst there are good chances of wipes, there are a hell of a lot less grind and repetitivness in them, plus by the time you get to end game in that, everybody knows what to expect and has a chance to plan accordingly.
STO makes a point of being solo freindly, and as such any mission that requires teaming up should be more fun than hard work. These STF's need serious rebalancing and work, frankl;y I'm surprised that these issues didn't arise during beta testing. So what if there are a few "shortcuts" that can be exploited, frankly given ground comabat as it is, this kind of thinking should be acceptable. The group I was in with infected ran past the last batch of drones because it was easier and avoided mainly the tedium of killing about half a dozen groups, using the same tactics, for an hour. Until the ground combat get's revamped to actually be FUN, there is always gonna be an issue with having to spend hours doing it. The state of the game, as it is, should not force players to exert the amount of foreward planning necessary to complete these STF's as they are now. There are more people who hate doing them than there are those who enjoy them at the moment in my experience, but people do so because there is little else to do.
The state of the game, as it is, should not force players to exert the amount of foreward planning necessary to complete these STF's as they are now.
That is where you make a mistake. Ive been with groups that have had no foreward planning. NONE. and i watched them say hey why arent the borg dying then someone would notice the node kill the node. now the whole group knows nodes 1st.
Considering the difficulty of the cure. I would say the infected is a great intro. Aside from its bugs. ill say it again
infected is not hard. If you have ever played ANY MMO and know the basics of aggro and pulling the infected is quite easy.
Until the ground combat get's revamped to actually be FUN, there is always gonna be an issue with having to spend hours doing it.
SO games that require you to do repetitive things for hours arent fun? ever sit down and play a good game of chess? warzone 2100? most rts's?
the problem is UNTIL more people learn what to do. There is always gonna be issues with having to spend hours doing it.
being fun does not = short. Theres a reason the mobs of borg are called trash mobs. its because they are the trash u have to dig through to get to the challenging areas.
darn i forgot to copypasta this to the above post.
The only real thing to complain about is why cryptic didnt do missions through out the game with different game components to prepare people for this mission.
STFs were something of a bolt-on. Cryptic didn't seem to anticipate that gamers, being gamers, would spend quite a lot of time plowing through the content they had. The Developers, in general, seemed somewhat surprised by people with level-cap characters after two weeks.
The STFs we have were haphazardly thrown in to try to give level capped players something to do aside from the B'Tran dailies. They don't seem to be particularly well designed; mostly, they're trash mobs, and lots of them. Hopefully they'll work on the design of the STFs at some point.
The game should probably introduce more than a simple "Kill 5 things" mechanic earlier in the game. It would help players prepare for STFs and make them game less of a grind.
SO games that require you to do repetitive things for hours arent fun? ever sit down and play a good game of chess? warzone 2100? most rts's?
I sometimes play games of chess and Go against myself; that requires more strategy and thought than playing STO. Chess is enjoyable because it requires a particular kind of strategic thinking and also introduces your opponent as a variable. I've never played the same game of chess twice.
The same can be said for RTS games. You are most often playing against another living opponent who is capable of acting in novel ways within the confines of the game's mechanics. In STO, you're generally killing 5 ships that are organized in a straight line. You can generally do this by whacking the space bar repeatedly; your angle of approach and gear are of relatively minor importance in most game quests.
If STO provided quests that were challenging or novel or that were at all variable or required even a modicum of strategy to complete, this game would have less people QQing about being bored.
the problem is UNTIL more people learn what to do. There is always gonna be issues with having to spend hours doing it..
Not from my experience. It's not UNTIL they learn what to do, it's UNTIL they learn to fricken listen. People in PuGs never listen to what you tell them, thus creates the problem, as my last post indicated.
Not from my experience. It's not UNTIL they learn what to do, it's UNTIL they learn to fricken listen. People in PuGs never listen to what you tell them, thus creates the problem, as my last post indicated.
i was more talking to cylak but. you also have a point. would stf's be as hard as they are now if people listened?
I mean on one end of the spectrum i understand what people are saying. 90% of the game u just shot till everything stops moving no real challenge. then pow stf's
but
I never really had a problem with stf's. i never could understand how people just blindly jump in and expect thigns to be given to them. The second i found out about stf's and that they were endgame raid/ hardshi7. I was on google "infected stf guide"
I research things. Which is another thing. Ive never played a game where i wasnt atleast lurking on its forums. How do people miss all these guides? how do people NOT CARRY EFFIN HYPO'S? Even on normal with your boff they have to heal you so you woul;d figure hey im not pllaying with boff im playing with a group of people. hmm no one in this team is a science officer. maybe i should get a magical item that heals me.
then they complain about being held. *not talking about the chain holds either thats a valid excuse* They will try many times and see someone when they get hit a circle expands outwards and knocks them down. but do they stop think and say "hey what was that how u knock them dowm?' no they keep pew pewing. I know I stopped and asked when i saw that shield in effect. I then went and got it for myself and all my boffs.
Its a huge learning curve thats all once u learn how to play it, it gets easy think of it like traiing for a marathon day 1 u can barely run a mile by with practice that mile becomes a cake walk. To many people hop on the mission dont understand it and die it takes getting use to. I myself wasnt a fan at first but with some patience u will learn to like it and it opens cryptic doors to all sorts of possibilities.
The only real thing to complain about is why cryptic didnt do missions through out the game with different game components to prepare people for this mission.
What learning curve?
The OP repeatedly underlined the fact that the mission is boring and painfully repetitive.
It's not like other MMOs, where teamwork and coordination are they key elements and each battle has a unique twist to it -- it's just one giant timesink with never-ending Borg until you get into a miserable little room with floating squares, as if video games haven't evolved since the days of Donkey Kong.
And as the OP pointed out, more HP does not mean more epic or more challenging...it just means a long, repetitive, boring grind.
I'll probably get flamed for invoking WoW, but anyone who played that game knows how exciting it was to enter a raid like Karazhan for the first time...it was beautifully designed, beautifully scripted and masterfully executed. As a player, you WANTED to be in there.
In STO, people refuse to run Infected despite some potentially great rewards, loot-wise. If people aren't running it despite the loot, then it's safe to say most people do not enjoy it and the design was a failure.
That's not meant to be harsh, just reality. It's simply not fun to hit 1 and 2 for three hours.
Comments
My main complaint though, was that after all that, I had precious little to show for it. The only 2 "Borg" drops were grabbed by other team members, so from my perspective I went through 4 hours of game time I really didn't enjoy, and didn't even have any particularly great rewards to show for it. The whole experience left me fairly unwilling to run Infected again, and I'm not in too big a hurry to do any of the other STFs (which I wouldn't attempt anyway unless I was comfortable with Infected, since I've read enough on the forums to know they're harder).
I'm really glad they're adding the new rewards to the STFs, but I'd like to see something else added. If everyone in the team had gotten a Borg drop or something when I'd run it, I might've felt I'd had gotten something for my trouble. As it was, the whole experience was 4 hours where I wished I'd just run through some dailies and got my Marks/Emblems instead.
See this post:
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=189864
The last 2 fleetmates we took through it said at the end that it was actually fun. Takes us about an hour start to finish.
Tell me about it.
I tried both of them yesterday with some other (very nice) guys and ohh boy, how painful that was.
Especially the cure, i really don't see where the fun is in that.
But concerning infected i must be lucky cause i tried this one only once and we finished it without really much trouble.
We have Ventrillo (that thing that allows you to talk over the Internet - who new I didn't - you can gauge my degree of noobness from this alone) that helped alot.
Because we worked as a team and followed one persons lead (the Fleet Admiral/leader) I found Infected fun and enjoyable and cannot wait for the Terrordrome and The Cure.
Infected did take a long time though, very long, but apparently we did it quite quickly according to the others in my team. I'm pretty sure that had I attempted it with all first timers it wouldn't have been as enjoyable, less so if players charge ahead and/or won't follow team instructions.
Here is the key to a successfull STF run.....also the reason why most PuG's fail.
Once I became able to do these missions I began. I've completed this missions over a dozen times now and of course, like your experiences, done various parts of it with a larger number of teams that all ended up the same.
The consoles in the last room sometimes will not show the option to press them. You have to move away and back to them, and hope you are in the right place and it will allow itself to be seen, sometimes several times, or trade the console with another player, all the while the clock is ticking away.
Nothing is worse then getting shot mid-jump and falling in and having to say to everyone. I died, we all need to start over.
And finally, the end. I think the queen drops at most 3 items. A purple, which I've gotten twice. A blue and a green. So after all of that, and the hours of play you mention, not even the entire team gets an award for the effort. And at our level xp is meaningless.
It is more a mission of endurance then skill which I'm finding many of the options left at VA level are. But at least you can complete it. I've yet to finish The Cure for reasons like this one and apparently Terradome has two seperate bugs that prevent you from succeeding. Only one of which I've reached and been faced with.
1. Have a vent Channel
2. Have at least 3 Eng with phaser turrets and Q mortors (most on cure on KA better to have force fleid kit)
3. having ppl you know and trust becuase other wise you SOL
Btw i have done KA with out a sci officer it was ways easy to tell you the true KA is the easiest
if you ask me, and for everone who says cure suxs it does, and i havent seen Terrordome it was fun till my fleet and i got to the engieener protecting part then we were done so i hope that gets better when they fix it
well said. however i say that infected is annoying and near to impossible. until cryptic replace those platforms with brigdes i'm doing pvp until i hit RA upper half lvl 2 and do terradome.
This is a bug. If someone leaves the platform before the upload is complete, the shield will go back up. Just make sure that everyone stays on the platform until it is done uploading. If you make a mistake and the shield bugs on you, you can reset by doing a team wipe.
Doubt Cryptic is going put in bridges. If you think Infected is impossible, wait till you try Cure or Khitomer. But really, there are a number of threads now about how to complete Infected. It's a team effort, and requires a proper strategy. Much like PVP, if you expect to just go on in and faceroll the mission like 95% of STO, in the words of Stromshade, "it's time to wake up and smell the disruptor burns."
Terradome, however, has some major bugs that will prevent mission completion in many cases. I would run this mission with this expectation.
thanks ill try this next time
Im getting tired of these threads. I join a team with guys who have done it and failed miserably lots of times and i join it and say. "shoot the nodes." "no u dont need to run in and shoot all the nodes in the room 1 at time" "Dont rush this isnt a race" and when we finsh all i hear is Wow this is so much easier than before. I guess I just needed to know what to do.
I run infected with 4 motion accel kits, 4 bunker fab kits, and 4 medic kits. and im a science officer. They obviously arent for me. When people dont know what to do they get frustrated.
Which is why I spent the last and will continue spending time looking for those frustrated people. Who cant get infected done and show them one way of doing it.
I also see randeon at night doing that also. And a few other. I URGE those who have trouble with the infected to do a few things.
1.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_s0SkARQUY Watch it.
2.http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=196118 Read it. Ask questions.
3. Make a thread somewhere asking if some experienced people would be willing to make a group and teach you the ins and outs of infected. **I would hop on this faster than a blonde on.... not appropriate.
4. Go in gamma and ask for help. I cant gaurantee people will help but it never hurt to ask.
5. PM ME
I could understand if this was the cure but infected. no. just no.
EDIIT
Darn all this writing and it was a necro thread?
My advice is to find a good fleet and try it on some kind of VOIP software.
Infected is fun. I've done a lot of MMO raids and dungeons and whatever in my day. STO has challenging and fun content. Don't blame Cryptic's design when you can't beat something.
1. Join a fleet that runs the STF's regularly
2. Get Vent or Team speak
3. Listen and work as a team.
If you do those three things you will get through the stf's just fine. Fleets do it everyday many times over. Quit relying on pugs.
If you can follow instructions and listen to the team leader you will get through it in no time. The gate in infected can be brought down the 1st time. If you didnt get any loot tell the team lead to put loot on need or greed (you got shafted there). Thetact cube the gate if you dont destroy the transformer and the Boss rebecca always drop good loot. The gate and rebecca drop the purple gear. If you dont like ground combat and are not willing to spec just a few points in your ground class your going to hate the STF's. Infected, The Cure, and KA have their bugs but fleets run these successfully all the time. If you dont want to do these things then good luck getting through them.
Lastly when you do finish Infected instead of leaving practice your jumping skills. It will pay off.
QFT! This can not be expressed enough. You can not and will not always be allowed to just sit in the middle. One day will come where your help will be needed doing the jumping. Practice makes perfect. I have gotten to the point that I can literally run and jump all obstacles. Came from running that mission so many times I could do it with my eyes closed.
Like i said earlier though, if you want a guy who can run you guys through that in less than 45 minutes, give me a tell in game and I will be happy to show you and your friends the ropes.
It was pretty fun, though. I enjoyed that it was never just a straight "kill everything" mission and there were always other goals, like destroying the conduit and the nodes, and then the final room, if a little involved, was a great finish. A teammate and I stayed on the center platform and shot at Borg while the others hopped around to the corners. It really felt like we had a specific role, and it was cool seeing the team leader's instructions going by in the chat as they tried to flip the switches.
Still, I'm not sure if I'll be doing that again soon, at least not in one go. The space section and then the long battle across the top level of the station seemed to drag on and on. People say that the other STFs take even longer, too... I'll have to clear out a weekend if that's the case.
I don't think the other ones really take that much longer. But they do suffer from the same too much filler, too much doing the same thing over and over factor. Makes 'em tedious and lowers the fun level.
I asked until I was blue in the face to please minimize all pop ups after the first Borg mob was destroyed...I'll be damned if both times I tried to run Infected that *somebody* hit continue instead of minimizing the pop ups. First run somebody fired at and destroyed the Transmitter.
This is probably why you guys had such a hard time. Somebody on a PuG team always seems to go against the grain and they TRIBBLE it up. Unfortunately I had to drop both teams.
I was with a team that got all the way to the end of the cure but couldn't finish it because we were short a healer to go melle the last boss. As another poster put it, there is not enough of these mission types throughut the game to prepare you for these. Anybody who has played WoW and can remember the deadmines will tell you the same thing. 5 man instances should be a little challenging, but not unforgiving, especially the first ones, and frankly these are just way to unforgiving.
We all know that ground combat isn;t as polished as the space combat, and personally I would like to see more space combat than ground combat in these missions, it's what everybody is used to and can play better at. Right now it really is too much of a grind and too much wipe tedium. hell I've played end game raids in WoW, and yes, whilst there are good chances of wipes, there are a hell of a lot less grind and repetitivness in them, plus by the time you get to end game in that, everybody knows what to expect and has a chance to plan accordingly.
STO makes a point of being solo freindly, and as such any mission that requires teaming up should be more fun than hard work. These STF's need serious rebalancing and work, frankl;y I'm surprised that these issues didn't arise during beta testing. So what if there are a few "shortcuts" that can be exploited, frankly given ground comabat as it is, this kind of thinking should be acceptable. The group I was in with infected ran past the last batch of drones because it was easier and avoided mainly the tedium of killing about half a dozen groups, using the same tactics, for an hour. Until the ground combat get's revamped to actually be FUN, there is always gonna be an issue with having to spend hours doing it. The state of the game, as it is, should not force players to exert the amount of foreward planning necessary to complete these STF's as they are now. There are more people who hate doing them than there are those who enjoy them at the moment in my experience, but people do so because there is little else to do.
That is where you make a mistake. Ive been with groups that have had no foreward planning. NONE. and i watched them say hey why arent the borg dying then someone would notice the node kill the node. now the whole group knows nodes 1st.
Considering the difficulty of the cure. I would say the infected is a great intro. Aside from its bugs. ill say it again
infected is not hard. If you have ever played ANY MMO and know the basics of aggro and pulling the infected is quite easy.
SO games that require you to do repetitive things for hours arent fun? ever sit down and play a good game of chess? warzone 2100? most rts's?
the problem is UNTIL more people learn what to do. There is always gonna be issues with having to spend hours doing it.
being fun does not = short. Theres a reason the mobs of borg are called trash mobs. its because they are the trash u have to dig through to get to the challenging areas.
darn i forgot to copypasta this to the above post.
STFs were something of a bolt-on. Cryptic didn't seem to anticipate that gamers, being gamers, would spend quite a lot of time plowing through the content they had. The Developers, in general, seemed somewhat surprised by people with level-cap characters after two weeks.
The STFs we have were haphazardly thrown in to try to give level capped players something to do aside from the B'Tran dailies. They don't seem to be particularly well designed; mostly, they're trash mobs, and lots of them. Hopefully they'll work on the design of the STFs at some point.
The game should probably introduce more than a simple "Kill 5 things" mechanic earlier in the game. It would help players prepare for STFs and make them game less of a grind.
I sometimes play games of chess and Go against myself; that requires more strategy and thought than playing STO. Chess is enjoyable because it requires a particular kind of strategic thinking and also introduces your opponent as a variable. I've never played the same game of chess twice.
The same can be said for RTS games. You are most often playing against another living opponent who is capable of acting in novel ways within the confines of the game's mechanics. In STO, you're generally killing 5 ships that are organized in a straight line. You can generally do this by whacking the space bar repeatedly; your angle of approach and gear are of relatively minor importance in most game quests.
If STO provided quests that were challenging or novel or that were at all variable or required even a modicum of strategy to complete, this game would have less people QQing about being bored.
Not from my experience. It's not UNTIL they learn what to do, it's UNTIL they learn to fricken listen. People in PuGs never listen to what you tell them, thus creates the problem, as my last post indicated.
i was more talking to cylak but. you also have a point. would stf's be as hard as they are now if people listened?
I mean on one end of the spectrum i understand what people are saying. 90% of the game u just shot till everything stops moving no real challenge. then pow stf's
but
I never really had a problem with stf's. i never could understand how people just blindly jump in and expect thigns to be given to them. The second i found out about stf's and that they were endgame raid/ hardshi7. I was on google "infected stf guide"
I research things. Which is another thing. Ive never played a game where i wasnt atleast lurking on its forums. How do people miss all these guides? how do people NOT CARRY EFFIN HYPO'S? Even on normal with your boff they have to heal you so you woul;d figure hey im not pllaying with boff im playing with a group of people. hmm no one in this team is a science officer. maybe i should get a magical item that heals me.
then they complain about being held. *not talking about the chain holds either thats a valid excuse* They will try many times and see someone when they get hit a circle expands outwards and knocks them down. but do they stop think and say "hey what was that how u knock them dowm?' no they keep pew pewing. I know I stopped and asked when i saw that shield in effect. I then went and got it for myself and all my boffs.
What learning curve?
The OP repeatedly underlined the fact that the mission is boring and painfully repetitive.
It's not like other MMOs, where teamwork and coordination are they key elements and each battle has a unique twist to it -- it's just one giant timesink with never-ending Borg until you get into a miserable little room with floating squares, as if video games haven't evolved since the days of Donkey Kong.
And as the OP pointed out, more HP does not mean more epic or more challenging...it just means a long, repetitive, boring grind.
I'll probably get flamed for invoking WoW, but anyone who played that game knows how exciting it was to enter a raid like Karazhan for the first time...it was beautifully designed, beautifully scripted and masterfully executed. As a player, you WANTED to be in there.
In STO, people refuse to run Infected despite some potentially great rewards, loot-wise. If people aren't running it despite the loot, then it's safe to say most people do not enjoy it and the design was a failure.
That's not meant to be harsh, just reality. It's simply not fun to hit 1 and 2 for three hours.